Opinion Today: The real Rosa Parks story

And a mug shot that's not what it seems.

View in browser|nytimes.com Continue reading the main story February 1, 2021 By Jenée Desmond-Harris Senior Staff Editor, Opinion A booking photo of Rosa Parks taken on Feb. 22, 1956, at the county sheriff's office in Montgomery, Ala.Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, via Associated Press This is the famous photo of Rosa Parks that accompanies almost every tribute to her. The image is everywhere during Black History Month. You can get it on a poster, a T-shirt or even a coffee cup from Etsy. I'm embarrassed to admit that until I edited this Op-Ed, I assumed the picture was taken after Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white passenger in 1955. You know, the story everyone hears in kindergarten. But it was actually taken in 1956, after she and other civil rights leaders were indicted by the city in an attempt to end the boycott. Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science and the author of nine books on the civil rights and Black Power movements including "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," writes, "The confusion around the image reveals Americans' overconfidence in what we think we know about Mrs. Parks and about the civil rights movement." (Her piece also reassured me that I wasn't alone in my confusion.) Theoharis argues that the widespread misunderstanding about the photo is just one example of the mythology around Parks and her legacy. She explains that the story many Americans know — "a simple seamstress changes the course of history with a single act, decent people did the right thing and the nation inexorably moved toward justice" — erases Parks's decades of pre-boycott activism, the massive pushback against the boycott, the suffering she endured as a result of her work and all she accomplished over the next several decades of her life as she fought racism in the North. 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