NEW YORK — At a time when interest in civil rights memorabilia is rekindled, a lifetime’s worth of Rosa Parks’ belongings sits in a New York warehouse, unseen and unsold.

Parks’ archives could be worth millions, especially now that 50th anniversaries of the civil rights era are being celebrated and the hunt is on for artifacts to fill a new Smithsonian museum of African-American history.

But a years-long legal fight between Parks’ heirs and her friends — a dispute similar to the court battle among Martin Luther King Jr.’s heirs — led to the memorabilia being taken away from her home city of Detroit and offered up to the highest bidder.

So far, no high bidder has emerged.

Parks is one of the most beloved women in American history. She became an enduring symbol of the civil rights movement when she refused to cede her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white man. That triggered a yearlong bus boycott that helped to dismantle officially sanctioned segregation.

Because of the fight over Parks’ will, historians, have had no access to items such as her photographs with presidents, her Congressional Gold Medal, a pillbox hat that she may have worn on the Montgomery bus and her ruminations about life in the South as a black woman.