Who Rosa Parks was, not just what she meant
By Emmarie Huetteman
Newly released papers offer a look at the feisty spirit of the seemingly mild Rosa Parks, who helped set off one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycott. "I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment that I couldn't take it anymore," Mrs. Parks wrote. The writing was part of thousands of her personal letters, photographs and other items that became accessible to researchers for the first time this week as the Library of Congress opened the largest collection of the civil rights icon's documents. Wayne State University has a smaller collection of Parks's manuscripts, which she gave to the university in 1976, focusing primarily on her work as an activist while living in Detroit.