ABSTRACT
This essay discusses a project in which the practice of doing public history collided with the neoliberal ethos of the monetization of historical memory. 1 The essay explores the controversies surrounding the Rosa Parks House Project and how the project was cancelled. It investigates CSSJ’s process of doing public humanities and public history work through the Rosa Parks House Project and argues how the project became caught in the vortex of the difficulties of engaging in this kind of work in the present. The project brought to the fore questions about white America’s appropriation of Black history and critically how the commodification process so central to contemporary American life became a deep current within it.
