McGuire said she had never heard that Parks wrote fictional
“This six-page essay we believe is a work of fiction,” said herve leger clothing Cohen. “We believe that Mrs. Parks meant for the story to be private. It never should have been part of the memorabilia collection.”
Civil rights historian Danielle McGuire, however, called the essay an astounding find. “Rosa Parks was very likely to have encountered this kind of proposition,” she said.
It helps explain what triggered Parks’ lifelong campaign against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men, said McGuire, whose 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 herve leger dresses for the NAACP the case of Recy Taylor, a young sharecropper raped by a group of white men in 1944.
McGuire said she had never heard that Parks wrote fictional essays.
“It would be nice to see evidence of that. She never talks about that in any of her work out there,” said McGuire. “It would be more likely that the protectors of her legacy are trying to protect her respectability.”
Parks writes in the essay: “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 sexual violence targeting 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.
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