Rosa Parks’ Presidential Medal of Freedom, left, and her Congressional Gold Medal are displayed at Guernsey’s auction house.
A pair of eyeglasses and and a typing textbook that belonged to Rosa Parks are displayed at Guernsey’s Auctioneers in New York. A years-long legal fight between Parks’ heirs and her friends led to memorabilia being taken away from her home city of Detroit and offered up to the highest bidder. But so far, no high bidder has emerged.
Rosa Parks sits in a Montgomery, Ala., bus. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man in 1956 sparked a bus boycott by Montgomery blacks, one of the key earlys in the civil rights movement.NEW YORK – At a time when interest in civil rights memorabilia is rekindled, a lifetime’s worth of Rosa Parks’ belongings – among them her Presidential Medal of Freedom – sits in a New York warehouse, unseen and unsold.
Parks’ archives could be worth millions, especially now that 50th anniversaries of the civil rights era are being celebrated and the hunt is on for artifacts to fill a new Smithsonian museum of African-American history.
But a years-long legal fight between Parks’ heirs and her friends – a dispute similar to the court battle among Martin Luther King Jr.’s heirs – led to the memorabilia being taken away from her home city of Detroit and offered to the highest bidder.
So far, no high bidder has emerged.
Parks is one of the most beloved women in American history. She became an enduring symbol of the civil rights movement when she refused to cede her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white man. That triggered a yearlong bus boycott that helped to dismantle officially sanctioned segregation, and lift King to national prominence.