HART Book Club

The HART Book Club, launching in February 2022, is a student-focused space to discuss books related to and written by Black, Indigenous, and racialised people. As a branch of HART (the Department of History’s Anti-Racism Taskforce), the Book Club is committed to representation, respect, and empowerment for the diverse voices, experiences, expressions, and intersectional identities of racialized groups on campus. The Book Club seeks to foster critical thinking, accountability, and anti-racism among students, staff, and faculty through engagement with books around anti-racism, solidarity, equity, and creating safe spaces for learning.

March Book Club 

To in honour of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and International Women's Day, March's book will be The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis.

"When Rosa Parks died in October 2005, she became the first woman and second African American to lie in honor at the nation’s capital. Yet much of the memorialization reduced her historical contribution to a single act on a bus on a long-ago December evening. In this revealing and comprehensive biography-the first critical treatment of Parks’s life-historian Jeanne Theoharis shows that the standard portrayal of Rosa Parks as a quiet and demure accidental actor is far from true.

Presenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress who with a single act birthed the modern civil rights movement, Theoharis excavates Parks’s political philosophy and six decades of political work to reveal a woman whose existence demonstrated-in her own words-a “life history of being rebellious.” From her family’s support of Marcus Garvey to her service with the NAACP in Alabama in the 1940s and 1950s, and from her courageous bus arrest and steadfast efforts on behalf of the Montgomery bus boycott to her work in Detroit challenging Northern racial inequality on behalf of a newly elected Congressman John Conyers and alongside Black Power advocates, Parks’s contributions to the civil rights movement go far beyond a single day. Even as economic hardship and constant death threats exacted a steep toll on Rosa and her husband, Raymond, she remained committed to exposing and eradicating racial inequality in jobs, schools, public services, and the criminal justice system."

For further information, please contact Catherine Ramey.

For assistance in accessing books, please contact librarian Mike Chee.