Exhibition Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words

Monica Morgan, Photographer. Rosa Parks and Elaine Steele Sitting with Children Enrolled in the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute “Pathways to Freedom School and Tri-State Day Camp,” ca. 1990. Photograph. Visual Materials from the Rosa Parks Papers, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (060.02.00)

Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development

In 1987 Rosa Parks and her longtime friend Elaine Steele co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development “to motivate and direct youth not targeted by other programs to achieve their highest potential.” In 1989 the Institute began the “Pathways to Freedom” bus tours. Students, age eleven through seventeen, conducted research and “trace the route of the Underground Railroad into the civil rights movement and beyond.”