Dorothy Parker’s Ashes Could Be Moved. Again.

When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People moves its headquarters from Baltimore to Washington in the coming years, there’s a small object from a backyard garden it doesn’t plan to take along: the ashes of the New York writer and critic Dorothy Parker.

How Ms. Parker’s ashes came to be interred there — and the debate over where they should go — is a tale as wild as any that she could spin herself.

Ms. Parker was known for her essays, short stories and poems published in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, as well as for her wry humor. She died in 1967 at 73 in her suite at the Volney Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Ms. Parker, who was Jewish, left the bulk of her estate and royalties from her writings to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and in the event of his death, to the N.A.A.C.P. Dr. King had never met her, but said he was deeply touched.