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Auction
House
Seeks to sell
Rosa Parks Collection
 (AP) - Arlan Ettinger will never
forget the response he got when he took one of civil rights pioneer
Rosa Parks' hats to a meeting at the Apollo Theater in New York. "It
was a fairly plain-looking black hat. And then I said it was Rosa
Parks'. And their mouths just opened up without saying a word and tears
flowed," Ettinger said. "It was a very, very powerful moment. You could
see the impact this woman has had on everyone."
A Wayne County probate court judge in Detroit has asked Ettinger's
auction house, Guernsey's, to find a buyer — preferably a museum,
university or other institution — for thousands of Parks'
personal items.
Among them are her presidential and congressional medals, a post card
from Martin Luther King Jr. and the hat Parks is believed to have been
wearing on Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her bus seat to a
white man, cementing her spot in civil rights history.
Ettinger, whose New York-based company has auctioned off items ranging
from the possessions of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Franklin
Roosevelt to Jerry Garcia's guitars, estimates the Parks collection
could be worth $10 million.
When it comes to the civil rights movement, "Rosa Parks was its heart and soul," he said.
Parks, the diminutive woman whose actions sparked the yearlong
Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and threats that eventually led her and
her husband to Detroit, died in 2005 at age 92 with many of her most
treasured possessions still with her.
There's the Presidential Medal of Freedom she was awarded by President
Bill Clinton, along with the rose-colored chiffon dress she wore for
the ceremony and the photo of her with the president. There's a
tattered schoolbook, "How to Speak and Write Correctly," that she kept
from her student days.
There's also a letter she wrote telling of King's house being bombed on
a night she was with him at a meeting just a month after the bus
boycott began.
"We do not know what else is to follow these previous events, but we
are trusting in God and praying for courage and determination to
withstand all attempts of intimidation," Parks wrote in her clear,
flowing script.
Parks left nearly all of her estate to the Detroit-based Rosa and
Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which was created to
teach young people leadership and character development. But her 13
nieces and nephews, which feuded for years with the people she
appointed to handle her affairs, filed a legal challenge to Parks' will
six months after she died.
A settlement was eventually reached, although terms of the deal were
sealed. Guernsey's, which had inventoried Parks' possessions, was asked
by the court to sell them.
Ettinger said the proceeds from the sale will be split between the
institute and Parks' relatives. There's no deadline for the sale.
Calls requesting comment left Wednesday with the institute's
co-founder, Elaine Steele, and with Lawrence Pepper, an attorney for
Parks' relatives, were not returned.
Ettinger said he has gotten the most interest in the collection from
groups in Alabama and Michigan. Both the Birmingham Civil Rights
Institute and Troy University, home to the Rosa Parks Library and
Museum in Montgomery, would like to house it or go in on it together,
he said.
Other logical places the collection could go would be The Henry Ford, a
Dearborn museum that features the bus Parks was on when she refused to
give up her seat, and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American
History in Detroit.
Communications chief Tony Spearman-Leach said the Wright Museum, which
held the public viewing of Parks before her funeral, would love to get
the collection but doesn't have the money. Wendy Metros, public
relations director for The Henry Ford, declined comment.
Much of the collection could be of interest to historians. Among the
hundreds of handwritten documents and letters is a note written in 1956
on the reverse side of NAACP stationary, in which Parks recounts being
told by a white boy when she was 10 years old that he was going to hit
her.
"He made a threatening gesture with his fist. I picked up a small piece
of brick and drew back to strike him if he should hit me. I was angry.
He went his way without further comment," she wrote.
Parks also wrote instructions for Montgomery's black citizens telling
them how to comport themselves during the bus boycott; her impressions
of the man who wanted her to give up her seat; and her thoughts on
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who was abducted from a
relative's home in Mississippi and was tortured and killed, purportedly
for whistling at a white woman.
"Anyone who views Rosa Parks as a mild, meek woman who for a brief
instant stepped out of the shadows, took action and then went back in,
this would debunk that in a minute," Ettinger said.
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