Connection Combat: Martin Luther King Jr. vs Rosa Parks

Question

Hi Connectors (and anyone else interested!), 

This month's Connection Combat is a showdown between activist reformers Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

Martin Luther King Jr., an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African American civil rights movement, is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. 

Rosa Parks  was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".

Martin Luther King Jr.

and

Rosa Parks

Ready, set, go!

The rules and guidelines are here, and post in this thread once you've made a connection so we can declare a winner! 

Remember, the goal is to connect one of these individuals to the previous month's winner -  Leonard Cohen.

If you need to be added to a Trusted List, let me know and I will add you.

The winning profile will be featured as one of our Special Connections (like AJ Jacobs and Kevin Bacon) so members can have a chance to see how they are connected.

Answer 1

Rosa should be connected when a merge goes through.

Comments

Nice work, Doug. It looks like you also connected Permelia Knight to the connected profile for her husband, so we don't need to wait for the merge to go through. :-) 

---

Great job, Doug!

---

Dang, fast!

Answer 2

It looks like the connection is complete now.

Answer 3

No connection yet, but I added the siblings of Dr. King's father from the 1900 and 1910 census.  That may help connect him somewhere down the road.

Answer 4

It kind of seems like these "connection combats" encourage hasty and non-thorough work...

Comments

I don't necessarily agree. It's some of our best WikiTreers who work on these connection combats each month and they are pretty dedicated to good work and accuracy.

---

I just saw that someone added a profile with one census citation attached to it, then left it, as far as I can see, for the sake of serving some a priori connection. (This would be different if the person conducted a more thorough investigation and found only one census citation.) I always thought that connections should be arrived at incidentally through slow and incremental work, not posited beforehand - that the data should drive the connections, not the other way around. 

 

---

If that profile was added recently, it could be that's all there was time for, and the creator will be returning to the profile later for more research.

---

Feel free to add sources yourself.

---

:)

Sources added to Rosa, and her husband's middle name is updated as well.

---

After Doug posted about his success, I noticed that some of the pre-existing profiles on Rosa's connection path lacked sources, so I added sources to a couple of those profiles. Maybe you were saying that I shouldn't have started working on those profiles unless I was prepared to take the time to polish them???

Answer 5

A connection for Dr. King may be possible through Ellen Ruffin. There are some researchers that claim she was the daughter of Samuel Ruffin and his slave Lucinda who was taken to Choctaw County, Alabama. A researcher named Maria Omar states this on this RootsWeb page. Lucinda is listed there as a member of Rehoboth Baptist Church.

How could we document or disprove this connection?

 

Comments

This seems to be an interesting theory, but I agree with you - how to prove?

If someone in the Ruffin line had DNA results, I suppose we could use this as documentation in some fashion. The problem here is that unless someone has provided these results, we don't have much we can use as proof in this area.

On the other hand, we've documented other "potential" connections with less proof than a DNA test, so if we had a reasonable amount of credible evidence, then we could establish the link as long as we document clearly where the concerns were.

Unfortunately, a single webpage with a conjecture that this is a possible outcome doesn't seem to be enough credible evidence to me. I'd be happier if there were more researchers who not only agreed with this theory, but also had contributed some additional information on where they got their information and possibly even back them up with some sources. Even oral family histories might be good, if they were clearly documented.

I'd be open to any evidence presented, and hopefully there's a bit more out there to be had.