“Making a Contribution” 77    Luther King Jr. as a candidate to serve on the executive committee, not- ing he had “made a great contribution to the branch, bringing in mem- berships and contributions.” Taking minutes at the NAACP meeting was Rosa Parks, who served as the organization’s secretary. A few weeks later, she left the city for a pivotal two-week trip to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.47 Earlier that summer, Virginia Durr had recommended Parks, who did seamstress work for the Durr family, as an ideal delegate for a work- shop on segregation that Myles Horton and the staff at Highlander had assembled. Unable to afford the workshop’s cost, Parks was granted a scholarship, prompting her to write a letter of thanks to the school’s ex- ecutive secretary. In the note, she expressed her excitement regarding this opportunity: “I am looking forward with eager expectation to attending the workshop, hoping to make a contribution to the fulfillment of com- plete freedom for all people.” Parks had a wonderful experience at the school: “I was forty-two years old, and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people. I experienced people of different races and backgrounds meeting together in workshops and living together in peace and harmony. I felt that I could express myself honestly.” She recalled wishing, as her time in Tennessee came to an end, that she could have stayed longer: “It was hard to leave, 48 knowing what I was going back to.” Upon her return from Highlander, Parks resumed her role as secre- tary for the next NAACP branch meeting. At the gathering hosted by the Metropolitan Methodist Episcopal Church, the chapter officially ap- proved King as a new board member. They also publicized an upcom- ing Women’s Day Program during which the featured speaker was to be introduced by Autherine Lucy, to whom the courts had recently granted the right to be admitted to the University of Alabama after being de- nied three years earlier. The group also continued to discuss the need for 49 blacks to register to vote. Despite the efforts of Nixon, the WPC, and the NAACP, the en- tire African American community had not come together as a unified front in their fight against white supremacy. A large part of the problem was the gulf between black professionals and the black working class in and around Montgomery. Earlier in the year, Virginia Durr had noted