Rosa Parks collection opens
A Montgomery Fair date book for 1955 features notes by Rosa Parks after she repurposed it as a notebook during 1956. This page includes a list of car-pool drivers during the boycott.
The Library of Congress is opening a new collection of 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs – many of which have never been seen by the public to coincide with what would have been Rosa Parks’ 105th birthday.
Library of Congress opens collection
A Montgomery, Alabama Sheriff's Department booking photo of Rosa Parks taken after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger on December 1, 1955.
Library of Congress opens collection
Draft letter to a “friend” written by Parks in January 1956, describing racial segregation in Montgomery, Alabama. Written on Montgomery Fair department store stationery. Parks was let go from her job as an assistant tailor at the store that month.
Library of Congress opens collection
Rosa Parks waves from a United Air Lines jetway in Seattle, Washington.
Photograph by Gil Baker, 1956.
Library of Congress opens collection
An undated recipe for "featherlite pancakes," written in Parks’s hand.
Library of Congress opens collection
U.S. President Barack Obama, second from left, takes part in the unveiling of the Rosa Parks statue in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. February 27, 2013 along with, from left: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker John Boehner, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. James Clyburn.
Library of Congress opens collection
Undated writing by Parks expressing the personal pain inflicted by racial segregation and discrimination.
The collection contains bits and scraps of her writings and notes for speeches, created in or around 1956, in which she described what happened on the evening of December 1, 1955, and the subsequent unfolding of the bus boycott.
Parks worked hard to place her arrest in the broader context of Jim Crow racial segregation and discrimination. She framed her decision to remain seated as one among many incidents of black protest.
Library of Congress opens collection
Rosa Parks waves as she listens to President Bill Clinton's address on race relations at the White House, September 18, 1998.
President Clinton signed a bill awarding Congress's highest honor to Rosa Parks on May 4, 1998.
"Rosa Parks' short bus trip, and all the distance she has traveled in the years since, have brought the American people ever closer to the promised land that we know it can truly be," Clinton said in a written statement.
Library of Congress opens collection
Mourners outside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan walk past the bus in which civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested 50 years earlier, November 1, 2005.
Parks laid in repose in the museum until her funeral on Wednesday, November 2, 2005.