A review from The Journal of Southern History, Volume XCII, No. 3, August 2026

Protesting with Rosa Parks: From Stagecoaches to Driving While Black.

By John K. Bollard. (Athens, Ga.: NewSouth Books, 2025. Pp. xx, 403. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-58838-552-9.)

In this sweeping history of Black resistance to transportation discrimination, John K. Bollard identifies mobility as a central battleground of the civil rights movement. Bollard constructs a long historical arc in which African Americans across the country challenged segregated streetcars, interstate buses, and city transit systems. In doing so, they forced courts, companies, and cities to renegotiate the terms of equal movement. By blending legal, social, and municipal histories, Bollard demonstrates how battles over who could ride, where they could sit, and at what costs were fundamental to the long Black freedom movement from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries.

Protesting with Rosa Parks: From Stagecoaches to Driving While Black is expansive. This work highlights the contributions of nearly a hundred activists across the United States. As the title suggests, Bollard contextualizes Rosa Parks’s infamous refusal to relinquish her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 as just one moment in a two-hundred-year struggle for equal access to transportation. There are other familiar names in this struggle, such as Frederick Douglass, Homer Plessy, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Pauli Murray, but Bollard’s greatest contribution is in highlighting lesser-known activists. For example, Mary Newhall Green wrote letters of protest to the directors of the Eastern Railroad in 1841 after she was physically assaulted for refusing to sit in the segregated train car to Boston. Another example is Private Henry Williams, a World War II veteran, who was murdered by a bus driver in Mobile, Alabama, after an argument. Bollard also includes Rosa Parks’s contemporaries, such as Claudette Colvin, who, at age fifteen, also refused to give up her bus seat to a white rider in Montgomery. Bollard examines the role that respectability politics played in the choice that civil rights lawyers ultimately made in abandoning Colvin’s case as the launch for the citywide boycott. Nevertheless, he situates her activism as an important moment in the narrative.

Bollard frames the “refusal to relinquish one’s seat and one’s dignity” as the most persistent arena of racial conflict and protest in the Black freedom movement (p. xvi). While the vignettes get repetitive, Bollard argues that part of the point is to “understand the nature” of resistance to “actual, continual, predictable, culturally sustained oppression” (p. xvii). The repetition underscores how acts of defiance from ordinary people were not isolated incidents but a constant struggle across generations of African Americans. In highlighting the similarities of activism across time and space, Bollard transforms acts that might be considered mundane into a collective narrative. He emphasizes how the fight for dignity in public transportation was waged not only in the landmark legal cases that have ended up in school textbooks but also in the countless and everyday confrontations that defined—and define—Black movement in the United States.

Because Bollard’s book is so expansive, he sacrifices depth for breadth and leaves the reader wanting more from some of the stories. Even this trade-off, though, serves Bollard’s larger purpose of emphasizing the ubiquity of Black protest in transportation across the United States across generations. Bollard’s choice of vignettes invites additional scholarship in this realm of civil rights history.

Bollard favors compelling narrative over analytical or theoretical framing. His strength in storytelling through empathetic and clear prose resists situating the individual stories in historiographical or theoretical context. Still, this historical approach seems deliberate to Bollard’s purpose of emphasizing the “weight of that history as it has been and continues to be borne by African Americans” (p. xvii).

Protesting with Rosa Parks offers an effective survey of Black resistance to segregation and racism in public transportation. By placing the iconic Rosa Parks in a long continuum of activism and centering the everyday struggles of ordinary travelers, Bollard reveals the persistent effort it takes for Black Americans to simply get from Point A to Point B.

Washington State University                                                                    Heather McNamee

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