DETROIT – The trustee handling civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks’ affairs said thousands more of her funeral programs will be printed to try and stop people who are profiting from originals.
The decision came after a bidder on the online auction site eBay offered more than $150 for one of the 14-page, photo-filled programs.
“People are exploiting it,” Parks trustee Adam Shakoor, a former judge, told the Detroit Free Press. “We are very concerned about that.”
The programs will sell for $5 to $10. Any surplus will be donated to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which sponsors education programs for young people. The additional programs will be produced “within a week or so” and made available primarily online, Shakoor said.
Ten thousand of the programs were distributed at Parks’ funeral Nov. 2 in her adopted home of Detroit.
Parks died Oct. 24 at 92. The funeral followed a week of remembrances during which Parks’ coffin was brought from Detroit to Montgomery, Ala., where she sparked the civil rights movement by refusing to give her bus seat to a white man, to Washington, where she became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
“There are many people who couldn’t come to the funeral who would want that keepsake,” Shakoor said. “We’d planned on printing more. We’ll just jump a little sooner than we expected.”
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