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These are some of the more than 2,000 items Parks left behind when she died three years ago. Retrieved from her Detroit home, the collection is up for sale by Guernsey's. The auctioneer is searching for an institution willing to pay at least $10 million to honor the woman who helped launch the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus.
"You rarely see the life of a figure right before your eyes like this," said Arlan Ettinger, president of the New York-based auction house. "What you get from all of this is the image of a determined person who knew what direction she wanted to take in life."
After her death in 2005, Parks' survivors and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, to which she left most of her estate, couldn't agree on what to do with her property.
A Michigan probate court decided that her historic act of civil disobedience made her writings and personal effects worthy of museum exhibition and ordered Guernsey's to find a buyer, Ettinger said. He said proceeds from the sale will be split between the Parks Institute and her relatives.
In the past week, he said, he's talked to a half-dozen museums and nonprofits interested in the collection; he declined to name them.
Such institutions as the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis or Boston's Museum of African American History might want the archive, said Ford Bell, president of the American Association of Museums in Washington.
"This is an important part of the history of the civil rights movement, and museums are the keepers of our heritage," Bell said.
Officials of the Rosa Parks Library and Museum on the campus of Troy University in Montgomery, Ala., have been speaking with Ettinger about the Parks collection, though they say the college can't afford the $10 million price, according to Ray White, a vice chancellor who oversees management of the library. He met last week with a dozen Alabama residents to explore a joint fund-raising effort.
"I would have to go after funding from private sources even if the price were $1 million," he said in a phone interview. "And then there's the question of what you do with it once you get it. It's extremely costly to protect the items and insure them."
Ettinger said he's also had talks with a "prominent organization" that is not a museum and would be "a wonderful fit" for the Parks archive, though he wouldn't name it.
Born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee, Ala., Parks became an iconic figure in 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, a defining act in the push for black equality. In 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation on public buses unconstitutional.
Parks moved to Detroit in 1957 with her husband, Raymond, and continued her civil rights work. In 1996, President Clinton awarded her the Medal of Freedom, the U.S. government's highest award to a civilian.
Among the items being auctioned are the dress she wore the day she received the medal, a rosary, her grade-school textbooks, and a recipe for "feather lite" pancakes using peanut butter.
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