Rosa Parks archives reveal fuller picture of legend

WASHINGTON – Rosa Parks’ status as a civil rights heroine has taken on a new dimension this week with the release of thousands of personal letters, photos and other items that promise to paint a fuller picture of the woman who refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger.

The Library of Congress will give scholars formal access to 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs today, her birthday. Parks died in 2005 at age 92.

The collection is on loan to the library for 10 years, part of an agreement with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which bought it last year. The library will display selected items from the collection as part of two separate exhibitions beginning in March.

Parks’ story has become the central narrative of the civil rights era. Schoolchildren learn that she was arrested in 1955 for taking a stand against Jim Crow laws that gave disparate treatment to whites and blacks in the South. Her arrest led to the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which helped end legalized segregation.

But the artifacts tell the story at a more granular level. For example, the front of a datebook from Montgomery Fair, the department store where Parks worked, shows a Hallmark logo, a butterfly, and pink flowers – a 1950s rendering of leisure. Yet Parks transformed the datebook into a tool for equality. On the back, she jotted names of carpool drivers needed to subvert the bus system during the 13-month boycott, which ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public buses were not constitutional.

Other images range from the prosaic to the profound. A recipe for feather-light pancakes, handwritten on a yellow envelope, could have been in any great aunt’s cupboard. The certificate for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, could not.

A 1956 letter addressed to Parks’ mother tells of a trip to New York, before a rally at Madison Square Garden.

“The people here are very nice,” Parks wrote. “I spent Thursday night with Mr. and Mrs. Thurgood Marshall.”