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Exhibition Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words

Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words

Rosa Parks’s Seventy-Seventh Birthday Celebration

Virginia Durr (left), Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, and Johnnie Carr at the birthday gala for Parks, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., 1990. Photograph. Visual Materials from the Rosa Parks Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (078.00.00)
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Rosa Parks’s Seventy-Seventh Birthday Celebration

In 1990 a party was held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to celebrate Rosa Parks’s seventy-seventh birthday. The black-tie event was primarily intended to benefit the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. Cicely Tyson, the mistress of ceremonies, introduced a series of stellar musical performances to an audience of 3,000 people. Coretta Scott King and Dick Gregory delivered personal tributes. Rosa is shown here at the party with three Montgomery comrades.