On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. You likely already know about this courageous act and that it led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Did you also know that Parks was actively involved in the civil rights movement long before and long after that famous day on the bus? Now, for the first time, the life and legacy of Rosa Parks can be explored through her personal papers which have been digitized and put online by the Library of Congress. The collection contains approximately 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs including personal correspondence, family photos, honors and awards, and more.
A panel of experts from the Library of Congress will be on hand on 3/29 from 9am-12pm (ET) to take your questions about Rosa Parks, her personal papers, and about how the Library made this collection available online. We also welcome questions about how K-12 teachers can incorporate primary sources from the Rosa Parks collection into their teaching.
The panel includes Library staff who organized and described the Rosa Parks papers:
Organizing a collection of personal papers is a fascinating process. As Senior Archives Specialist Meg McAleer described it: “Personal papers help us make sense of the public person, understanding their actions, reactions, thoughts and motivations a little more clearly. In one of her autobiographical writings available in the collection, Parks asked herself: ‘Is it worthwhile to reveal the intimacies of the past life? Would the people be sympathetic or disillusioned when the facts of my life are told? Would they be interested or indifferent?’ Hardly making us indifferent, Parks’ collection breathes life into an icon in ways that truly inspire.”
The panel also includes staff from the Library’s Educational Outreach division who work with K-12 teachers to incorporate Library of Congress collections into their teaching:
See the Rosa Parks primary source gallery designed to help K-12 teachers use the Parks collection in their classrooms.
Stay in touch with the Library of Congress through the Library’s Blogs, Twitter or Facebook accounts. See more options for connecting with the Library. We look forward to your questions!
EDIT: Hi folks. It's 12:05 here and the official AMA has come to an end. We will continue to monitor this thread and will send new questions to our panel and post our responses. Thank you for a wonderful conversation!
Claudette Colvin?
How does the LoC deal with papers and material of a sensitive nature, with info about people still living etc?
The article on organizing was fascinating. Thank you so much for doing this!
As a non-American whose familiarity covers only the basics of the civil rights movement, what new historical insights and knowledge do you think will we be able to gain from her papers about topics such as the insight workings of the civil rights movement?
Here in Alaska, we praise the legacy of Elizabeth Peratrovich and the Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945. Peratrovich was prompted to act by a series of discriminatory events, including segregated theaters in Nome. Do you know of, or did you uncover, any link between Alaska and the civil rights movement that sprang up around Parks?
When it comes to personal papers, and collecting and organizing them, where do you draw the line between a person's individual records and the spinoff items that came from their actions? For example, you might keep a letter, but would you keep newspaper clippings or things that were inspired by an individual's actions?
What did Rosa Parks think about her role in the Civil Rights movement in later years? Seeing as she died only a decade ago, she certainly had a lot of time to reflect on it, after all.
I have been reading a book titled The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Patricia Bell-Scott, 2016). Is there any evidence in the Rosa Parks papers that she ever met Pauli Murray, who began her civil rights activism in the 1930s?
Do you have any writings from Rosa Parks that show her thoughts directly before she got on that bus in 1955?
I'm sure she was nervous, but was she aware of the significance that her actions that day would hold? Do you think she ever expected to gain the national attention that she did?
How do you use the papers to teach children about racism in America?
Here's a question that just arrived via Twitter: "Where was she heading to on the bus? Home? Work?"
Two questions just came in from Rachel W., an NYC middle-school teacher who participated in the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute on civil rights last year:
How did Parks interact with the Civil rights movement and it's leaders after the boycott, say up until 1970? Did she correspond with people like John Lewis, and keep up her acquaintence with King?
What can the personal papers tell us about Rosa Parks' time at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, under the tutelage of Myles Horton and Septima Clark?
Thank you very much for all the time you have taken to answer all of our questions. Huff3909
As a medievalist, the "personal papers" with which I'm familiar are mostly letter collections--carefully recopied, edited, and organized to preserve a very specific public persona. The image that seems to arise from the description of Parks' papers is rather the opposite: "stashed in drawers," troublesome tax returns, etc. So when she writes:
Is it worthwhile to reveal the intimacies of the past life? Would the people be sympathetic or disillusioned when the facts of my life are told? Would they be interested or indifferent?
What document does that come from? At what point in her life did she write it?
How conscious was she of shaping her legacy through the collected set of personal papers?
How did the collection get from "stuffed in desks" to the auction house to the LOC? I read that the collection is on loan from a private foundation; how does leasing a collection work?
Thanks!
Might be a little late, but I just wanted to pop in and thank Adrienne Cannon for helping me find some sources some months ago. I was looking for information on the Frederick Douglass papers and she guided me to Box 53, which hadn't yet been digitized and which I eventually used in my project. If she should ever see this, thanks again!