From Rosa Parks
Author: Parks, Rosa (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP))
Date: August 26, 1955
Location: Montgomery, Ala.
Genre: Letter
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Details
After King addressed the Montgomery branch of the NAACP on 14 August, the branch president, Robert L. Matthews, requested that King join the executive committee. Parks, secretary of the local branch, informs King of his selection to serve on the committee.1
Rev. M. L. King
309 S. Jackson Street
Montgomery 5, Alabama
Dear Rev. King:
This is to inform you, as requested by Montgomery Branch NAACP president, Mr. R. L. Matthews, that you are a member of the executive committee of the branch. You are most cordially welcomed to be a part of the official staff. Your outstanding contribution merits this action.
There will be a meeting of the executive committee and branch members at the Pilgrim Health and Life Insurance Company office, 131 Monroe Street Monday August 29 at 7:30 P.M. Please be present for very important business.
Respectfully yours,
[signed]
Rosa L. Parks, Secretary
Montgomery Branch NAACP
P. S. There will not be a meeting Sunday August 28.
RLP
1. Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913. She attended the laboratory school of Alabama State College in Montgomery but had to leave before graduating to begin working as a seamstress at age sixteen. After her marriage to Raymond A. Parks in December 1932 she returned to school, receiving her high school diploma in 1933. In 1943 she was elected secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP. After several attempts, Parks became registered to vote in 1945. On 1 December 1955, after a dozen years of civil rights activism, Parks refused to move from her seat when a bus driver attempted to enforce Montgomery’s segregation ordinance. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. As a result of their involvement in the movement, Parks and her husband lost their jobs, and after several months of continued intimidation they moved to Detroit, where she still lives. In 1965 Parks began working for Congressman John Conyers in Detroit, retiring from her position in 1988. In 1987 Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. See her autobiography, with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992).
Source: MLKP-MBU, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers, 1954-1968, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University, Boston, Mass.