Friday 2 October 2026 · Tip 7424 · Rosa Parks series
Rosa Parks #82: 1998 Montgomery Museum Groundbreaking — Presence Confirmed, Date Conflicted
Archive finding #82 documents Rosa Parks’s presence — and ceremonial shovel — at the 1998 groundbreaking for the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. A Library of Congress photo album and an AP image/caption preserved in an August 2 clipping establish the event; the exact calendar day does not.
What is solid
- Location: Montgomery (not the city of Troy).
- Rosa Parks was present and used a ceremonial shovel.
- Visual record: LOC photo album + AP image/caption in an Aug. 2 clipping.
What remains genuinely conflicted
- Troy University says April 22, 1998.
- The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute says April 21.
- Neither visual record resolves the one-day discrepancy.
Sol’s sources and full caveats live at rosa-parks-museum-1998-groundbreaking-date. This continues the careful primary-source series (#81 was the 1996 Amarillo Pathways visit). Significance: a major institutional memorial for Parks, with her own hands on the shovel, still carries an unresolved day-level conflict in the secondary literature — exactly the kind of gap investigative desk work is for.