Rosa Parks letter honouring Martin Luther King put up for auction
A hand-written letter by Rosa Parks honouring Martin Luther King has been put up for sale.
Priced at $54,000 (£41,273), the letter was written by Ms Parks 13 years after he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
The document links two of the icons of the Civil Rights Movement.
Ms Parks was a black woman who was arrested and briefly jailed in December 1955 for refusing to surrender her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
Then a 42-year-old seamstress, Ms Parks was the first person to challenge the state’s segregation laws. After being released on bail, she was fined $10 and ordered to pay $4 court costs.
Her arrest became a cause célèbre among black residents. Led by a local clergyman, Martin Luther King, they organised a boycott of the local bus system.
A 381-day protest in which African Americans refused to ride the city’s buses and a raft of legal challenges culminated in a Supreme Court ruling which forced Montgomery to desegregate its transport system.
It also led to the sweeping away of the discriminatory laws in the American South which separated public facilities used by blacks and whites.
Reflecting on the incident in later years, Ms Parks wrote: "I had been pushed around all my life, and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore."
The letter offered for sale was sent to a Mr Kessler, an autograph collector, who had written to Ms Parks asking her opinion of the civil rights leader.
In the letter, Parks said: “It is difficult to put in words, on paper any comments about the late Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
“So much has been spoken and written about him by so many other people.
”I admired and respected him as a truly great man committed and dedicated to freedom, peace and loyalty for all oppressed humanity. He was a leader of the masses in Montgomery, Alabama and the nation.”
News of the letter’s sale emerged after a week in which the US honoured another leader of the Civil Rights movement, Congressman John Lewis, who died aged 80 earlier this month.
A collection of Ms Parks’s writings - along with the record of her arrest - was put on display at the Library of Congress in Washington DC last year.
Ms Parks, who died aged 92 in 2005, was honoured with a statue in Montgomery.
