Treasures, Tidbits All Up For Sale

Auction to Reveal Personal History of Rosa Parks

NEW YORK

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks used to jot notes in her church bulletins, noting sermon titles and song selections.

She kept a postcard sent by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he visited Rome two years after she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala.

And among the clothes she left behind when she died in 2005 was a simple white stewardess dress and black stewardess hat that she wore when she prepared Communion at her African Methodist Episcopal church in Detroit.

Parks, a private woman best known for her one act of public defiance 50 years before her death, spent her life holding onto treasures and tidbits of her own history, both religious and cultural.

There are her 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom and the 1999 Congressional Gold Medal, keys to numerous cities, and hundreds of tributes from schoolchildren.

Now thousands of Parks's personal items have been inventoried by Guernsey's, the Manhattan auction house that has handled the possessions of celebrities from President John F. Kennedy to Elvis Presley.

The collection offers an intensely personal view into the rather ordinary life of a laywoman who was actively involved in her church, and who kept several Bibles and worship programs with her personal notes jotted down over the decades. In 1976, she noted that the minister at her church, St. Matthew AME Church, preached on "Conquering the Storm." In 1983, it was "The Inherent Power of Friendship," and in 1997, "We are God's Children."

On the back of some 1980s stationery from the Rosa Parks Art Center, she wrote: "Spiritual message: I will greet this day with love in my heart. Expecting nothing as all things are already in my possession."

A Michigan probate court has asked Guernsey's to find a new owner for the entire Parks collection. The proceeds of the sale -- which could total $10 million -- will be divided among a Detroit institute named for Parks and family members.

Leaders of the AME Church have expressed interest in the collection. Other interested parties include organizations from Parks's native Alabama.

The AME Church, at its quadrennial General Conference this month, passed a resolution calling on church leaders to "do whatever is necessary to protect the legacy of Deaconess Rosa Parks and the role of the AME Church in the modern day civil rights movement."