The six-page essay, written in her own hand many years after the incident, is among thousands of her personal items currently residing in the Manhattan warehouse and cramped offices of Guernsey’s Auctioneers, which has been selected by a Michigan court to find an institution to buy and preserve the complete archive.

Civil rights historian Danielle McGuire said she had never before heard of the attempted rape of Parks and called the find among Parks’ papers astounding.

It helps explain what triggered Parks’ lifelong campaign against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men, said McGuire, whose recent book “At the Dark End of the Street” examines how economic intimidation and sexual violence were used to derail the freedom movement and how it went unpunished during the Jim Crow era.

“I thought it was because of the stories that she had heard. But this gives a much more personal context to that,” said McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book recounts Parks’ role in investigating for the NAACP the case of Recy Taylor, a young sharecropper raped by a group of white men in 1944.

Of her own experience, Parks wrote, “He offered me a drink of whiskey, which I promptly and vehemently refused. . He moved nearer to me and put his hand on my waist. I was very frightened by now.”

“He liked me. .. he didn’t want me to be lonely and would I be sweet to him. He had money to give me for accepting his attentions,” she wrote.

“I was ready to die but give my consent never. Never, never.”

Most people know the story of Parks, a black, middle-aged seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. Guernsey’s President Arlan Ettinger said her personal papers reveal a much more complex individual, one who spent a lifetime fighting for racial equality and against the sexual violence of black women.

Parks is credited with inspiring the civil rights movement with her solitary act of defiance on Dec. 1, 1955, that led to the Supreme Court outlawing segregation on buses. She received the nation’s two highest honors in her lifetime, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.

She died in 2005 at age 92, leaving the trove of personal correspondence, papers relating to her work for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, tributes from presidents and world leaders, school books, family bibles, clothing, furniture and more – about 8,000 items in all.

“It is wonderful and breathtaking,” Ettinger said. “It will be up to the institution that ends up with it to make this material known to the world.”

Proceeds from the sale will go to resolve a dispute over her estate, divided between her relatives and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development that she created in 1987.

Guernsey’s, known for its sale of iconic and celebrity collections, took an inventory of Parks’ homes in Detroit soon after she died and is looking for an institution to buy her archive, which Ettinger described as the most complete he’s ever seen.

The only thing missing, he quipped, is the bus itself. The bus is in The Henry Ford, a museum in Dearborn, Mich.

The archive reveals an infinitely complex individual, Ettinger said.

Parks worked on many cases with the NAACP, including the Scottsboro defense of nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. She was involved in the black power conventions in the 1970s and the anti-apartheid movement in the 1990s.

Parks wrote on anything she could get her hands on. The backs of church pamphlets and NAACP flyers are filled with her thoughts and observations.

There are detailed notes on how African-American citizens should comport themselves during the bus boycott following her arrest that lasted 382 days and about the organization that led it, the Montgomery Improvement Association, headed by a young pastor named the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Elsewhere, she laments about life under the oppressive Jim Crow laws and asks what is wrong with the world when her jailer refuses her a drink of water.

She also vividly recalls an incident when she was 10 years old involving a white boy who threatened to hit her. Demonstrating some of the determination she exhibited on the bus decades later, Parks writes “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.”

Parks’ memoirs include one with author Jim Haskins and another with one of her attorneys in the early 1990s, but by then said McGuire, “her story was pretty much well-rehearsed, and limited to her time in Montgomery and the bus incident.”

“Her story had become mythic and iconic … I can’t imagine what that felt like for her to have a whole history of activism and political work erased and turned almost into a cartoon character,” said McGuire.

Guernsey’s has talked to about 20 museums, libraries, university and churches about buying the archive over the past three years.

“There hasn’t been a group that didn’t desperately want it but had to face the reality whether they could afford it,” Ettinger said, adding that he was currently in discussions with three separate entities – an institution and two individuals who could buy the archive with the intention of donating it to a museum or other cultural institution.

He declined to give an exact figure but said $8 million to $10 million was in the “ballpark.”

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of the New York Public Library, was among the interested institutions.

Its new director, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, said the center has very little material on Parks and would love to own some of her papers but because the archive is being sold as a single collection, it took the Schomburg out of the running.

“She is a witness to the beginning and the maturation of the civil rights movement. . She walked as close to Martin Luther King Jr., as you can get at the beginning of the movement,” Muhammad said.

McGuire wondered why Parks omitted the attempted rape incident from her memoirs but included the story about the little boy who threatened her.

“It shows some kind of conscious effort in shaping her own legacy but also, I think, speaks to the issue of respectability. She doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable telling the world about what happened,” she said. “But she’s contemplating telling people about it because she’s written it down.”

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Last week I visited my sister who proudly told me that she refused to purchase any BP gas. On any other day her comment might have engendered an “Amen” chorus from my soul. But on that day, by that time, I had witnessed my 99th photograph of oil-soaked pelicans, fish slithering through sludge, and wetlands coated with black slime. The world had changed. So while her particular comment fell on deaf ears, my soul heard another message clearly: it is time to aggressively rethink our way of life—specifically our dependence on fossil fuels.
Twenty-one years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, we still have the same bad habits. Now, oil from another huge gas company, BP, is leaking its way from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic, and again, everyone is crying for a boycott.
But, will boycotting BP make a difference? The Montgomery bus boycott and the resilience of Rosa Parks taught us that the power of our voices when united in the pursuit of a cause can make a real difference in the world. We boycott because it’s a simple, yet effective, method of getting the message across: we disagree with you. Boycotts send a clear message and compel companies to change their standard operating procedures – even when it’s against their nature.

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And what is their nature? It probably can be best described by remembering that old story about the scorpion and the frog. During a flood, a kind-hearted frog lets a scorpion ride to safety on his back. But, just as they reach the middle of the river, the scorpion stings the frog. As they both sink beneath the waves, the frog asks, “Why did you sting me?”
“It’s my nature,” says the scorpion. “That’s what I do.”
But is it only BP’s nature that needs to change as a boycott might suggest? A boycott would hurt the local economy, prolong the current economic downturn and do nothing to impact other corporate conglomerates whose hands are just as unclean as BP’s. A boycott would also do nothing about the fact that my hands, my sister’s and all of ours are pretty unclean too. It’s time to face the music: we simply cannot continue living at the expense of our environment.
This country was built with strength, ingenuity, and the firm belief that we can rise above what society dictates to us. The past 250 years of building our nation in the face of great challenges both internal and external have taught us that we have the power to change our natures and our destinies. So, instead of boycotting BP, who is, sadly, just stinging us because that’s the nature of large corporations who seek speedy profit at the expense of the rest of the world, let’s do what we know works. Let’s find real, practical ways to change our culture for the better.

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I touched on this before, but my main problem with the concept of Black history month is that it’s too American. Tossing Dr. King, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Rosa Parks at me is all well and good, but if I didn’t know any better—and if I were younger, I might not—it would be easy for me to assume that Black history started on these shores. This goes back to my earlier point about intelligent Black people which, since some difficulty with my meaning in using the term ‘intelligent’ arose, I’ll define intelligence now as simply ‘problem solving’ ability.

But I think that by containing the idea of Black history to Black American history, credit is backhandedly given to our slave masters for our very origin as a people. Clearly, we weren’t anything or anybody over in Africa. We were ‘made’ so to speak, when we got here.

It takes a historian with the patience of Job to unearth any facts about our West African roots, so thorough a job has been done on erasing that history by Africa’s European colonizers. You might not know that there is plenteous evidence to support the claim that West Africans were here in this hemisphere as well as all across the globe way back when Europeans still believed that the world was flat.

You almost might never have heard of Hannibal—no, not Lecter—the Carthaginian (North African) general that conquered most of southern Europe using southern Europeans to do most of his fighting. This was sort of like the way that the Buffalo soldiers were used, but in reverse.

Now, you might have heard of the exploits of Hannibal, depending on how big a Quentin Tarantino fan you are and if you’re familiar with Dennis Hopper’s famous death scene in the movie True Romance. But Tarantino’s script never went as far as to name the great man.

It’s astonishing to consider, but world history would be irrevocably different if at any time during Hannibal’s 8 year occupation outside the gates of Rome he had decided to bash the gates down and simply conquer the joint.

Think about it; only one disciple of Christ’s gospel is recorded to have traveled into Europe; that was Paul, the one that didn’t even known Jesus personally and also the one that went to Rome. This suggests that the other disciples were busy in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Now, imagine how different the world would be today if we had been the ones with the bibles and the guns.

From the New York Times:

On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.

But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.

Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.

Last week Phillip Hoose won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The honor sent the little-selling title shooting up 500 spots on Amazon.com’s sales list and immediately thrust Ms. Colvin, 70, back into the cultural conversation.

Click here to read more.

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It can and should be argued that when laws are unjust, the morally righteous man is an outlaw. Therefore, it would be downright loony to consider Harriet Tubman a criminal because she stole people’s property and set it free, or to call Rosa Parks a criminal because equal fare paid should always mean equal privileges, or to call Muhammad Ali a criminal because he refused induction into the US Army to fight in a war that he religiously opposed.

It would be loony, but it’s also true. All three were criminals. All three broke the law.

But let’s say that the moral terrain isn’t so rocky and we’re dealing with more conventional criminals. And not the Oskar Shindler types that might have occasionally stretched a truth here or there to help people, but, you know, hustlers and the like. Are they heroes too?

Well…

The popular Balzac paraphrase holds that “Behind every great fortune there is a great crime” and if we consider that illegal bootlegging afforded the money necessary for Joseph Kennedy to make one of his sons a US President, one a US Attorney General, and another a longtime Senator, we’d have to admit that Balzac wasn’t lying.

Still, I must admit that I do find it a little disheartening that until the ascension of Drake, the only possible way to have been considered a credible MC was to have had as a past an equally credible run as a crack dealer.

Seriously, even if we Blacks do tend to idolize our criminals, are we any different than any other people? Sure, a lot of white folks seem pissed about Bernie Madoff, but right after a criticism, you’ll see them shaking their heads and hear them whistling to themselves almost worshipfully about the splendor of a con that brought in 65 billion dollars.

The most interesting irony, I think, about the whole criminal thing is that when notorious mob rat Sammy “The Bull” Gravano “turned” on his boss, John Gotti and gave him up in order to get a lighter sentence and enter the witness protection program, all the New York papers roasted Gravano. After The Godfather, I guess that the media was expecting a little integrity from its gangsters. Meanwhile, that same media seems to expect Blacks to snitch, as if we have no such integrity to be concerned about.

Larry Davis (pictured above) was a criminal. Click on his name and read his Wikipedia profile and tell me whether or not he was a hero.

From Pam’s House Blend

Hillsboro, Missouri: This is the only video of what actually happened at the event this afternoon. The news only showed the woman being escorted away by the police. What happened was the women walked in with signs, the crowd booed and yelled at the women. The women rolled up their posters and put them down. A photographer/reporter approached the woman on the end and wanted to see what the poster was. As the woman went to show the photographer/reporter what the poster was, a man from the bleachers stood up and snatched the poster from the woman and photographer/reporter. As the woman went to retrieve her poster the police stepped in and escorted the woman and the man from the building.

The poster was not of Obama, it was not pro health care, the poster that was taken from the woman and wrinkled up into a ball was of Rosa Parks.

National news coverage only showed the woman being escorted from the forum and left out the fact that it was the man who started the incident. Not to mention it was a poster of Rosa Parks.

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