For nearly one hundred years the NAACP has been a champion of social justice that has fought to ensure that the voices of African Americans would be heard and to change negative aspects of American society. The connection between the NAACP and Dorothy Parker may seem unlikely, but besides being the greatest wit of her time, Parker was an avid social activist. Having no heirs, she left her estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom she'd admired but never met.
As King was assassinated within a year of Parker's death in 1967, the estate rolled over to the NAACP which benefits from the royalties to this day. Learning that Parker's ashes had been languishing in her lawyer's filing cabinet for twenty-one years, the NAACP stepped in, built a memorial garden, and interred the ashes there in 1988. The circular memorial recalls the famed Algonquin Round Table and includes Parker's self-written epitaph, "Excuse my dust."
