Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954, the council used its dollars and clout to stoke economic intimidation and violence against the burgeoning civil rights movement. Essentially a white-supremacist chamber of commerce, with a fast-growing network across the South in the wake of the U.S. The rabbits’ “interracial” union had inflamed Montgomery's chapter of the White Citizens’ Council, whose members argued that the book amounted to grooming by literary means, conditioning preschoolers to cross the color line.

And it featured a cute, furry couple: a male black rabbit and his white female playmate, who becomes, over the course of the 32-page book, his bride. But this slender picture book was his own. White’s “Charlotte’s Web,” Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie” series and Little Golden Book titles, among many other beloved classics. She was adding her two cents to a nasty national argument about a 1958 children’s book, “The Rabbits’ Wedding,” by the celebrated illustrator Garth Williams. Her letter, topped by the headline “Tell It to Old Grandma,” was both book review and pointed defense of the white South. It was an odd but not random set of observations. Indeed, of all the animals perhaps this family is among the most ardent practitioners of free love.” After sharing her bona fides - college graduate, respectable matriarch, savant about educational illustrations - Parker wrote: “Now rabbits as I know rabbits may have some problems, but not the problem of marriage. In May 1959, the former Alabama schoolteacher Dora Haynes Parker mused about the sexual habits and matrimonial customs of rabbits in a letter to her hometown newspaper, The Montgomery Advertiser.

White rabbit chronicles books