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Parks Memorabilia To Be Auctioned Off

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The Associated Press

The Tampa Tribune

Published: July 5, 2008

LANSING, Mich. - LANSING, Mich. - 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 the Rev. 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, who 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.

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