The Library of Congress recently made personal papers of Rosa Parks available online, for free.

The collection contains approximately 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs. It documents many aspects of Parks’s private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans. The collection includes the years 1866-2006. 

Many of Parks’s writings describe the events surrounding her arrest in 1955 after she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger, as well as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Her papers also include writings on Parks’s work in Congressman John Conyers’s Detroit office; her participation in major civil rights events such as the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in 1957, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Mississippi Freedom Project in 1964, and the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968; and Parks’s Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal.

The collection also documents Parks’s affiliation with organizations such as the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development; Hampton Institute; Highlander Folk School; Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Saint Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church, Detroit, Michigan.