When Rosa Parks died in October 2005, she was the first woman and just the second African American to lay in honor at the nation's capital. Yet much of the memorialization reduced her contribution to a single act on a bus one long-ago December evening. Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who, with a single act, birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks's politics and years of activism. She shows readers how this civil rights movement radical sought -- for more than a half a century -- to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice.