ROSA PARKS VISITS OAKLAND COMMUNITY SCHOOL

In this short feature, Rosa Parks is shown being greeted by Oakland Community School students. The children performed a play for her depicting her arrest after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, which, according to the article, was “an incident that helped touch off the Southern civil rights movement.” Oakland Community School students also created and performed plays about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, among others–documents about those events can be found in this archive. Parks’s visitation of the school, as well as the children’s play, demonstrate OCS’s commitment to active engagement with one’s history and the world, summed up by their motto “The World is A Child’s Classroom.”