>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. [Music] >> HELENA ZINKHAM: The Library of Congress is home to the Rosa Parks Collection, on loan from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation for 10 years. Mr. Buffett decided to purchase this special material in 2014, when he learned that it was languishing in an auction warehouse. He wanted to bring these rare items back into public view and ensure their preservation. Rosa Parks was a seminal figure of the Civil Rights Movement. Her collection reveals how deeply she believed in a moral imperative to oppose discrimination and the denial of individual rights. That belief most famously resulted in her decision to challenge the bus segregation laws in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. But, her autobiographical writings in this collection, they reveal numerous times in her life when that conviction motivated her to act. The collection documents many aspects of her private life as well as her public work on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. While the 7,500 manuscript documents and the 2,500 photographs span 140 years, the content focuses on the decades of the 1950s through the 1990s. This includes Mrs. Parks' own writings, letters from presidents, her Congressional Gold Medal, her Presidential Medal of Freedom, and wonderful hand-drawn cards of appreciation from scores of school children. What follows now, are highlights from the collection and a look behind the scenes at how our team of experts in cataloging, preservation, digitization, exhibition, and teacher training, how they are all making this legacy of Rosa Parks available to the world. We are deeply honored to have been selected as the steward of the Rosa Parks Collection. >> HOWARD BUFFETT: I think it's so important for us to remember the iconic figures that changed our lives and that gave us what we have and preserved what we have. And so, an African-American woman in the 1950s to do what Rosa Parks did, showed how much difference one person can make. It's important for our children to see that and to really embrace it and understand it. Without getting this collection out of the boxes and out of the warehouse and in front of people, that wasn't going to happen. And so, I thought we should, make sure that this was in a place where millions of people can see it and benefit from it and, obviously, the Library of Congress, there's no place better than this facility and this team to do that. >> MARICIA BATTLE: We have a very large collection that deals with civil rights and so it was sort of a fulfillment of a dream to have the person who they considered the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, come into the collections. >> ADRIENNE CANNON: The Rosa Parks Collection will illuminate other facets of her life, her family life, her Christian faith and spirituality, her activism post Montgomery bus boycott, and it will also shed additional light on some of the details of the Montgomery bus boycott. >> MARICIA BATTLE: Most people have the perception that Rosa Parks was the lady who wore pink, the lady who always had a beautiful purse, a beautiful hat on her head, and she was this quiet voice that sort of spoke to you. But, I think one of the things they'll realize after looking at and viewing this collection, is that she was a lion underneath all of that. She had a way of softly drawing you in and then sort of hitting you with the facts just square between the eyes. And I think they'll be surprised. >> MEG MCALEER: Every collection tells a story, well actually many stories. And the first thing I do when I approach a collection is to try to discover what those stories are. And I do this by assessing the scope of a collection and the relationship between the parts. The collection came to us stored in these cartons. And in the cartons, papers were grouped together in large envelopes. I've completed my initial survey and I came up with broad categories to arrange the papers. For instance, I have a category of family correspondence. This is the largest cache of letters actually written by Rosa Parks in the collection and they're very revealing. One that moves me in particular is a letter she wrote to someone she addresses as, Dear friend. I don't know who the person is. It's written on Montgomery Fair stationary. She was employed at Montgomery Fair at the time she refused to give up her seat on the bus on December 1, 1955. In this letter, she tries to set what happened to her on December 1st in a broader context of the Jim Crow South. She explains that segregation is complete and a solid pattern- it is the way we live. And then she goes on to describe the experiences of people on buses, having to go to segregated public schools, churches, public libraries. And then also what it was like to work at Montgomery Fair where she could not use the restrooms used by white employees or the employee lounges and she was not allowed to sit at the counter and have her lunch. But, at the end of the letter, she closes with something that indicates the gravity of the situation, that goes beyond the indignities of the daily slaps of discrimination. She ends the letter by asking if this person had heard about the lynch murder of Emmett Till, the 14 year old teenager from Chicago who was visiting family in Mississippi in August, 1955, when he allegedly flirted with a married white woman. And for this, he was brutally murdered. She later tells Till's mother that at that moment when she was deciding whether to get up from her seat on that bus or not, she thought about her son, she thought about Emmett Till. >> ANITA PEEK: On the day that she was arrested, she was sitting where she was supposed to sit in the colored section. But, at that time, they used to move the sign if they chose to. And the back of the bus was already crowded so she didn't have to get up if there was no more seats further back in the bus. And when the bus driver asked for the four people to stand, none of them stood originally. But after he threatened jail, the other three got up, but she kept sitting. >> ADRIENNE CANNON: Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing a bus driver's order to surrender her seat to a white passenger, happened on December the 1st, 1955. There was no media present. There were no reporters or photographers to take photographs of the incident. The photograph that is known worldwide that shows Rosa Parks sitting on the bus with a white man sitting behind her, was taken a year later on December 21st, 1956, the first day that the buses in Montgomery, Alabama were integrated. A month after the Montgomery bus boycott began, Rosa Parks lost her 25 dollar a week job as an assistant tailor at the Montgomery Fair department store when it closed its tailor shop. Her husband, Raymond was forced to resign his job at a private barber's concession in Maxwell Field Air Force Base. In 1957, Rosa, Raymond, and her mother, Leona, moved to Detroit to join her brother, Sylvester. She worked for 8 years as a seamstress before becoming an office receptionist and administrative assistant for newly-elected Congressman, John Conyers in 1965. And she served as his liaison with the black community in Detroit. She kept abreast of all community activities, attended rallies, and she particularly dealt with his constituents' needs with concerns about welfare benefits, social security, and job discrimination. >> MARICIA BATTLE: The relationship that Mrs. Parks had with John Conyers was a very close and kind one, as you can tell from this photo that Conyers dedicated to her. And it's signed, "to the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, with love and thanks, John Conyers, July 22, 1985." One of the other pieces that we find is this image of both Rosa Parks and Conyers protesting in front of the General Motors warehouse or factory. Protesting the closing, because so many African Americans worked there, they thought this was unfair for this particular plant to close. >> JOHN CONYERS: One day she came to me and said, "Congressman, I'd like to ask for a pay reduction." I said, "I beg your pardon?" Nobody's ever asked for that before. Nobody's ever asked for it since [laughter]. And she said, "Well, you know, you let me go so many places here in the country and even overseas." And I said, "Mrs. Parks, you honor me by coming to my office and having worked with me for so long." And it was no secret that more people came to see Rosa Parks in my office than came to see me! [Music] >> MARY MUNDY: Preparing collections for scholars to use involves a lot of different activities. One of the first things I do is survey the materials, get familiar with the subject content and formats represented in the collection. Then the next thing I do is always look to see if the collection is organized. If there's a logical organization, I want to keep that organization. If the collection lacks any organization I'll need to impose an order that's conducive to research. Next, formats with special storage requirements are separated from the rest of the material. For instance, photographic negatives need to be stored at cold temperatures for preservation purposes. Large objects and fragile items need to be stored flat in special boxes fit to their size. Additional work involves placing items in containers, folders and sleeves. And every object has to be numbered with the collection storage information so they can be easily identified on the shelf. And items pulled can be refiled after use. The final step involves describing the collection in the form of a catalog record with subject headings and lots of other access points so scholars can find the material in our online catalog. All of these pictures really reflect her lifelong commitment to civil rights, her work with youth and her dedication to family. This is a very early photograph of her husband Raymond Parks and his sister. This is unique in the sense that it's mounted on a metal frame that is decorated with a landscape scene. Rosa Parks had a lifelong interest in helping youth and educating them about African American history. She started working with youth actually in the late '40s with the NAACP youth council. This piece represents the impact that Rosa Parks had on children. And it's a greeting card actually from a group of school children that was sent to her in 1998 and one of the largest greeting cards we have in the collection from school children. >> ADRIENNE CANNON: In 1987 she co-founded with Elaine Steele, the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development as a tribute to her late husband, Raymond who passed away in 1977. The purpose of the institute was to motivate and direct the average youth not targeted by other programs, towards achieving their highest potential. >> MARICIA BATTLE: So, her legacy is to instill in children, no matter how small your beginning, there's no end to what you can achieve. So, here are photos of Rosa Parks at the John Freeman Walls historic site in Canada. She's surrounded by children. One of the things that she did with the institute, is they have a Pathways to Freedom, where they take children onto different sites of the Underground Railroad, and the Walls site is thought to be one of the last sites on that Underground Railroad. Here we have, in Detroit, in the 90's, a camp, a day camp, again, surrounded by children. She and Raymond did not have any children, but her brother, Sylvester, had 13. >> ELAINE STEELE: When children came into her midst, there was a wonderful smile that came on her face. Didn't matter how young they were, you know, up into their teen years. And if they were interested in learning, she was just endeared to them more. [Music] >> ANDREW ROBB: In the conservation division, we treat a wide variety of special collection items. So, that might mean mending tears or for books, taking the binding apart and rebinding it. For photographs, it could be removing tape or consolidating edges where there's small parts of the photograph that have flaked off. So, what we're really trying to focus on with treatment is stabilizing things so that future generations of the public and readers can use them. So, the Rosa Parks collection requires some amount of treatment. These are mainly mid-century to late century twentieth century materials. So we have photographs, manuscript materials, books, scrapbooks and albums. And we think that Rosa Parks or someone in her family made this album. While we could just focus just on the photographs, we work together with our curators and our book conservators to think carefully about the object itself and what we need to do to preserve the whole thing. A term we like to use is the integrity of the object. The album is an album and we want to retain that format as much as possible. >> MARICIA BATTLE: One of the things that impressed me is the fact that she had managed to hold on to all of the family photographs and kept them in really good condition. Here, for instance, is a great image of her father. And an early and later photograph of her mother Leona, with a cousin, and Leona is the one seated in the chair. Another interesting fact about the visual materials is that we do finally get to see the photos of her husband, Raymond Parks. And what's interesting about that is because Rosa Parks was basically the major person that everyone concentrated on, so Mr. Parks was always in the background. So, to know that she carried a photo in her wallet of him, and that he was always by her side, just tells you the role that he played for her, basically. >> ADRIENNE CANNON: Rosa McCauley met Raymond Parks in 1931. She was particularly impressed with the fact that he was engaged in what she called the racial situation. And she remarked that he was the first person outside of her family who she discussed racial politics with and engaged Rosa in the national campaign to defend the Scottsboro Boys. They married in 1932. Raymond always wore a suit, and so he is the man here in the dark suit. And he's surrounded by his friends and customers. Another item in the collection that we have is a family bible that records the records of several generations of Rosa Parks' family, the Edwards', the Percival's, the McCauley's, the Nobel's. >> ALAN HALEY: The bible came to us in pieces. It showed evidence of handling and tears. So we had to use Asian papers to fill in those losses and they're quite extensive. We use Asian papers because they're chemically stable, they're strong, and yet they're very flexible. So, it will integrate with the original materials to make it very functional. The sewing was, for the most part, gone. So, we need to give it a new sewing structure which will allow the Bible to be flexible enough to open safely for researchers in the future. The spine was missing, so we will need to dye clothe in a sympathetic color to the covers, which we still have, to put a new spine on the book. And much of it seemed to be out of order. We know, of course, that the core of the bible is from Genesis to Revelation- that part is easy to collate. But, there are many, many pages probably over 150 leaves of supplemental materials, not paginated. And we don't know how to put this back together again. I'm also working with bible scholars at the American Bible Society. So we're trying to find out which year it was published and that will give us a solid record of the order of the materials that are included within. I think the part that would be of most interest to scholars would be the registry in the middle where the births and deaths of the Parks family are recorded. It does go back to the 1880's-1870's. [Music] >> PHIL MICHEL: Because the collections we have to scan are many sizes and varieties and types- some is photography, some manuscripts, some books, we have digitization equipment that can handle a wide variety of materials. Some of them are flatbed type scanners or digital cameras on copy stands and the like. Digitization is very important for collections because it really gives us the opportunity to share these collections with the world. Anybody who has access to a computer can now see and view these items without having to come to Washington, DC. It gives us a chance to provide an image surrogate without having to repeatedly handle the collections over and over again. So, they can be stored in a proper environment and hopefully they'll last a very long time this way. The scanning produces images of such high quality that researchers, they really can zoom in and see all of the details of the original. Well, sometimes even more details than what you could really see viewing the image right onsite. So we're really happy that people can get into that depth of research using these high resolution images. It's really gratifying to work with a collection like the Rosa Parks collection because there's so much interest in it and so much demand. And for a lot of people who aren't aware of the Library and the services we provide and the richness of our collections, it's a great opportunity to show and share with the world, help everyone be able to access and see them, and appreciate them for what they are. [Music] >> JEFF FLANNERY: Anyone over the age of 16 can use the library's collections as long as they get a valid reader registration card. However, some of the reading rooms, for instance, the Manuscript reading room, require special conditions for use. Most of the users in our reading room are from the academic community. However, we've had a children's author come in and is using the papers. We've had congressional staff come in and use the collections. We have a wide variety of research use using the Parks papers. Her papers are here in the reading room complimenting many other collections that we have that relate to the Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century in the United States. So, she sits next to the records of the NAACP, the largest collection that we have, the records of the National Urban League, the papers of Frederick Douglas, and A. Philip Randolph, and James Foreman and other leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. So, her papers compliment the collections and they will gain insight into the struggles during the twentieth century for the Civil Rights Movement. [Music] >> ADRIENNE CANNON: Because of the breadth and richness of our civil rights resources, we were able to easily incorporate items from the Rosa Parks papers in our recent exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Long Struggle for Freedom. We looked specifically at items in the Rosa Parks papers that related to the Montgomery bus boycott. >> CARROLL JOHNSON-WELSH: Rosa Parks was a dispatcher at the time in the Montgomery Improvement Association. Here, she gives instructions to carpoolers and drivers participating in the Montgomery bus boycott, asking them to "do not call for transportation if you are in reasonable walking distance to your job." She also asked them to remember "how long some of us had to wait when the buses passed us without stopping in the morning and evening." The second item is a Hallmark calendar issued by Montgomery Fair Department store where Rosa Parks was a seamstress. On this particular page, it has listed the drivers of the boycott. And at the top, we have the name, King listed along with some of the other leaders in the first group of drivers. The last name is Nixon, who was her mentor during the NAACP period of her life. And then the 3rd item we have is a flyer announcing her speaking engagement at Sharp Street Methodist Church in Baltimore, MD. She was requested by many throughout the United States to come and speak on the behalf of the NAACP and so this is one of her first speaking engagements. The goal of the Interpretive Programs Office is to bring the Library's collections to the public, nationally and internationally through our physical exhibitions, our online exhibitions, our traveling exhibitions, our cultural partnerships, and through our public programs. I've personally have talked to thousands of visitors that have come through the exhibition. I've talked to people from Europe. I've talked to people from within the United States, South America, and Canada. They are finding out new information about Rosa Parks beyond her stance on the bus. >> PAUL BEVERLY: I always get chills when I see the original materials. There's just something very authentic about seeing an actual letter or the actual flag that the NAACP flew or the actual piece of music that Charles Mingus wrote, in his own hand. Just seeing that just a few inches in front of you and knowing that a real person was connected to that. So, it's a wonderful exhibit. [Music] >> LEE ANN POTTER: Educational Outreach at the Library of Congress is the unit that is dedicated to serving teachers. We develop professional development opportunities from workshops to Summer Institutes to sessions at conferences. We also develop resources that we make available through the Library's website. We write articles for professional journals. And in all of these instances, what we are trying to do is get primary source documents- photographs, letters, journal entries, drawings, newspaper articles, into the hands of classroom teachers. One of our Summer teacher institutes focused specifically on the Civil Rights movement and we were able to include a wide variety of materials from the Rosa Parks collection and we also hosted a very special panel where individuals who had known Rosa Parks, described to our teachers their experiences in the civil rights movement. >> KAREN SHER: My students are sort of numb to the notion of the struggle. And I always talk about Mamie Till, and I always talk about Rosa Parks, and I always talk about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, like they were so far away, even from me. And this week has really taught me that it's not that far away. That you know, Rosa Parks' best friends are here talking to us about what it was like to be in those moments with her. And not because of fanfare or celebrity, but because of love. And it's something I try really hard to instill in my students. >> LILA CABBIL: Her courage and her strength had everything to do with her spirituality. So, her staying in her seat was her own decision and she knew who had her back. >> JOE MADISON: She was a different kind of militant. You'd never see her raise her fists. It wasn't the black panther type of militant. It was a real militancy that in essence says, "I'm gonna stand my ground." >> ROBERTA MCLEOD: She always encouraged young people, "do your best. No matter what someone else is doing, do your best." And she believed as educators, we had a responsibility to encourage our young people to do their best. >> GEOFFREY MILLS: I think what I'm getting from this week together with the others, is that we should allow students an opportunity to explore what they're seeing in a document. Give them opportunity to bring their own experiences, their own lived experiences, interpretations, to what they're seeing. And through collaboration, come to some type of understanding of what it all means. >> KATIE FEENEY: Well, I learned about like how she really like stood up for herself and even like how they all had to go to the back of the bus. And it just like really makes me like appreciate what she did. And I just think that like what they had to do was completely unfair and that it really makes me like appreciate. >> MACKENZIE LEE: I learned that she got a lot of awards for her bravery on that bus that day. And that made me feel really, really lucky that I'm born in this time period. That we're all the same and equal. That's what I learned. >> DILLON STONE: I think Rosa Parks had a huge impact on our community today. And that without her, people would still be discriminated based off of their race. [Music] >> JOHN CONYERS: By refusing to give up her seat and standing for equal rights, Rosa Parks inspired a nation and became a legendary example of the value of a single courageous act. At a time when our nation faces challenges, both domestic and global, I believe that the example of Rosa Parks remains relevant to every citizen. >> ANITA PEEK: She believed that all human beings should have the right to be educated, should have the right to be free and should have the right to be treated justly. She believed in justice. >> ELAINE STEELE: That's what she wanted in life. You know, that people understand one another and have that human kindness. And, as you learn more about others, then it indeed inspires you. >> ADRIENNE CANNON: We were fortunate to receive in the collection, both Rosa Parks' Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. In 1996, President Bill Clinton awarded Rosa Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of the role that she played in sparking the Montgomery bus boycott, and the role the bus boycott, in turn, played in evoking a new phase of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest honor in the nation awarded to a civilian. In 1999, Congress awarded Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor that Congress bestows on a civilian. >> ANITA PEEK: Congresswoman Julia Carson who's deceased now, she was very surprised that Mrs. Parks had not received the Congressional Gold Medal prior to her entering Congress. And she worked very hard with many others to make sure that it happened. >> ELLA MCCALL HAYGAN: Congresswomen Carson, she was a dynamite person and she would say, "Ms. Parks you needed to have that medal a long time ago!" And she would just laugh at her, she thought she was really funny. Every time I look at the medal and think about the medal, I think about that day. >> ANITA PEEK: She always seemed to be surprised that people thought that what she did was so important. She felt that she made a decision that day that no matter whether she lived or died, that it was important to stop giving in when you were doing the right thing. She really believed in right and wrong. >> HOWARD BUFFETT: Rosa Parks was all about freedom and you're sitting here in Washington, DC and this is where our freedom is preserved. And so I think that to have this collection sitting here in our capital is exactly where it should be. This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc dot gov.