By ULA ILNYTZKY, Associated Press – 2 days ago
NEW YORK (AP) — A first-person essay written by Rosa Parks presents a
detailed and harrowing account of a young black housekeeper who is
nearly raped by a white neighbor.
Looking like a remembrance from Parks' own life, an expert called it
an exciting find that might help explain her lifelong advocacy. But on
Friday an institute created by Parks disputed that, saying it was hers
but a work of fiction.
The six-page document is among thousands of the civil rights
activists' personal items currently residing in the Manhattan
warehouse and cramped offices of Guernsey's Auctioneers, which has
been selected by a Michigan court to find an institution to buy and
preserve the complete archive.
The Associated Press was provided with some samples of the documents
in the archive, including portions of the essay. Archivists who
reviewed the documents for Guernsey's provided descriptions of their
contents and characterized the encounter as a "near-rape."
Steven G. Cohen, a lawyer for the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for
Self Development in Detroit, said people who knew Parks well were
aware that she liked to write fictional essays for herself. Parks'
friend of 45 years, Elaine Steele, never heard Parks speak of the
encounter and was not aware of the document, Cohen said.
"This six-page essay we believe is a work of fiction," said Cohen. "We
believe that Mrs. Parks meant for the story to be private. It never
should have been part of the memorabilia collection."
Civil rights historian Danielle McGuire, however, called the essay an
astounding find. "Rosa Parks was very likely to have encountered this
kind of proposition," she said.
It helps explain what triggered Parks' lifelong campaign against the
ritualistic rape of black women by white men, said McGuire, whose book
"At the Dark End of the Street" examines how economic intimidation and
sexual violence were used to derail the freedom movement and how it
went unpunished during the Jim Crow era.
"I thought it was because of the stories that she had heard. But this
gives a much more personal context to that," said McGuire, an
assistant professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Her book recounts Parks' role in investigating for the NAACP the case
of Recy Taylor, a young sharecropper raped by a group of white men in
1944.
McGuire said she had never heard that Parks wrote fictional essays.
"It would be nice to see evidence of that. She never talks about that
in any of her work out there," said McGuire. "It would be more likely
that the protectors of her legacy are trying to protect her
respectability."
Parks writes in the essay: "He offered me a drink of whiskey, which I
promptly and vehemently refused. ... He moved nearer to me and put his
hand on my waist. I was very frightened by now."
"He liked me ... he didn't want me to be lonely and would I be sweet
to him. He had money to give me for accepting his attentions," she
wrote.
"I was ready to die but give my consent never. Never, never."
Most people know the story of Parks, a black, middle-aged seamstress
who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in
Montgomery, Ala., in 1955.
Guernsey's President Arlan Ettinger said her personal papers reveal a
much more complex individual, one who spent a lifetime fighting for
racial equality and against sexual violence targeting black women.
Parks is credited with inspiring the civil rights movement with her
solitary act of defiance on Dec. 1, 1955, that led to the Supreme
Court outlawing segregation on buses. She received the nation's two
highest honors in her lifetime, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and
the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.
She died in 2005 at age 92, leaving the trove of personal
correspondence, papers relating to her work for the Montgomery branch
of the NAACP, tributes from presidents and world leaders, school
books, family bibles, clothing, furniture and more — about 8,000 items
in all.
Guernsey's sale is a component of a resolution to a dispute over her
estate among her relatives and the institute she created in 1987.
Guernsey's, known for its sale of iconic and celebrity collections,
took an inventory of Parks' homes in Detroit soon after she died and
is looking for an institution to buy her archive.
Parks worked on many cases with the NAACP, including the Scottsboro
defense of nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Alabama in 1931.
She was involved in the black power conventions in the 1970s and the
anti-apartheid movement in the 1990s.
Parks wrote on anything she could get her hands on.
There are detailed notes on how African-American citizens should
comport themselves during the 382-day bus boycott following her arrest
and about the organization that led it, the Montgomery Improvement
Association, headed by a young pastor named the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr.
Parks' memoirs include one with author Jim Haskins and another with
one of her attorneys in the early 1990s, but by then said McGuire,
"her story was pretty much well-rehearsed, and limited to her time in
Montgomery and the bus incident."
"Her story had become mythic and iconic ... I can't imagine what that
felt like for her to have a whole history of activism and political
work erased and turned almost into a cartoon character," said McGuire.
Guernsey's has talked to about 20 museums, libraries, university and
churches about buying the archive over the past three years.
"There hasn't been a group that didn't desperately want it but had to
face the reality whether they could afford it," Ettinger said, adding
that he was currently in discussions with three separate entities — an
institution and two individuals who could buy the archive with the
intention of donating it to a museum or other cultural institution.
He declined to give an exact figure but said $8 million to $10 million
was in the "ballpark."
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