Block Auction House Highlights the Career of Rosa Parks
Items from the personal and professional life of a civil rights icon come to auction to close out Black History Month.
An upcoming sale at Block Auction House in Ferndale, Michigan, will feature a tribute to one of the Civil Rights Movement’s most celebrated figures. The “Important Rosa Parks Archive, Gibson Guitar & Estates” auction will be held online on February 27 and includes ephemera from the Rosa Parks Congressional Career Archive.
Rosa Parks is often called “the mother of the Civil Rights Movement in America,” as she is on the program for the 1984 NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet, which is up for auction with a presale estimate of $200-$350. She is best known for her famous bus ride on December 1, 1955, where she was arrested after sitting at the front of the bus and, in defiance of the law, refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. Her activism began long before that day and extended long past it. As the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP, she helped organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which protested segregation on public transportation. She lost her job and faced death threats for her actions, and she and her family moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1957, where she remained active in the NAACP and worked for Congressional representative John Conyers.
Several auction lots come from Parks’s career with Conyers. Four lots consist of U.S. House of Representatives Statements of Earnings issued to Parks from 1968 to 1980. Another, the State of Michigan Notary Public Commission Certificate she received in 1973, has a presale estimate of $600 to $900.
Other lots offer a glimpse into her personal life. These include a handwritten note signed “R.P.” (estimate $700-$1,1500), a signed check dated 1980, along with a receipt for a medical device (estimate $800-$1,200); a set of two personalized letterhead sheets with her Detroit address ($300-$500), and a 1976 statement from First Independence National Bank ($350-$650). The last item carries additional significance, since the First Independence National Bank was an important African–American–owned institution.
The auction comes at the end of Black History Month, which marks its 50th year of national recognition this year. The practice of a national observance of Black history in February is a hundred years old. In 1926, historian Carter G. Woodson founded “Negro History Week,” choosing the second week of February because it includes the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. This year’s celebrations honor a century of observance.
All images courtesy of Block Auction House/Live Auctioneers
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