Rosa Parks is known to most people as an icon, a woman whose refusal to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white passenger became a symbol of the civil rights movement. Now a newly discovered essay by Parks tells the story of how she was nearly raped by a white neighbor for whom she worked as a housekeeper in 1931, shedding a far more personal light on what civil rights historian Danielle McGuire describes to the Associated Press as Parks’ lifelong campaign against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men.

The AP interviewed McGuire, who had never heard the story before (it was not included in Parks’ memoirs.) McGuire, author of “At the Dark End of the Street,” which “examines how economic intimidation and sexual violence were used to derail the freedom movement and how it went unpunished during the Jim Crow era,” called the finding astounding and said that it “gives a much more personal context” to Parks’ work.

The six-page handwritten essay was part of a collection about 8,000 items belonging to Parks, which a Michigan court has authorized Guernsey’s Auctioneers to sell to an institution that will preserve them. In it, Parks writes: “He offered me a drink of whiskey, which I promptly and vehemently refused. He moved nearer to me and put his hand on my waist. I was very frightened by now ...”