When Rosa Parks refused to move from her bus seat to give it to a white passenger on December 1, 1955, police in Montgomery, Alabama arrested her. While she wasn’t the first person to use a bus sit-in to protest segregation — Bayard Rustin’s is the earliest one I’m aware of — Parks’ arrest was the catalyst for the Montgomery bus boycott and turned her into a civil rights icon. Parks later moved to Detroit where she spent decades organizing and fighting for human rights. You can now see the iconic bus in all its fully restored glory at the Henry Ford Museum, but as explained in an official blog post, that was no simple task.
As you can imagine, even finding the right bus was a challenge. It’s not like officials were terribly worried about which specific bus Parks was on at the time of her arrest, and while the Henry Ford could have simply restored a bus from the same era, getting to look at a bus like the one Rosa Parks rode doesn’t really carry the same weight as seeing the actual bus.
When bus number 2857 was retired and sold, employees told the buyer Roy H. Summerford it was Rosa Parks’ bus. He kept it in a field, and after he passed away, his daughter Vivian and her husband inherited it. At the time, they knew it was supposedly Parks’ bus, but they didn’t have any proof that it was anything more than an old family story. That, however, is where Robert Lifson, the president of internet auction house Mastronet entered the story. Hoping to prove it was Parks’ bus so he could sell it for Vivian and her husband, and somehow, he actually did:
Montgomery bus station manager Charles H. Cummings had maintained a scrapbook of newspaper articles during the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott. Next to articles describing the arrest of Rosa Parks, he wrote “#2857" and “Blake/#2857.” James Blake was the bus driver who had Rosa Parks arrested. The son and wife of Mr. Cummings, now deceased, confirm that he jotted down the bus number because he felt the events were so important.
Often, as in this case, historical truth is not officially recorded, but is passed along in private memoirs and oral tradition.
Finally, in September 2001, the Wall Street Journal published an announcement that Parks’ bus had been found, authenticated and would be auctioned off the next month. That drew the attention of the Henry Ford, and after hiring a forensic document examiner to independently authenticate the scrapbook, it moved forward with trying to buy the bus. With a high bid of $492,000, the Henry Ford won, beating out both the Smithsonian and the City of Denver.
With half a million dollars already invested in a bus that had been sitting in a field for nearly 30 years, the restoration began. The Henry Ford tasked MSX International with the project, which was estimated to cost more than $300,000. They reused original materials where they could, and when that wasn’t an option, they took parts from other identical 1948 General Motors buses. The goal wasn’t to bring it back to showroom condition, though. Instead, they wanted it to look like a seven-year-old city bus, just like it would have when Rosa Parks boarded in 1955.
While the Henry Ford was willing to invest a lot of money into the project, it didn’t do it alone:
In September 2002, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities excitedly announced, “The bus in which Rosa Parks helped inaugurate the civil rights movement will be restored in Dearborn, Mich., by Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.” By then, The Rosa Parks bus project had received $205,000 in funding through the Save America’s Treasures Program.
“These Save America’s Treasures grants help ensure that the nation’s priceless cultural heritage will be passed on to future generations of Americans for many years to come. From monuments to manuscripts, the rich and varied stories of American democracy are being preserved and told,” said Adair Margo, then-Chairman of the President’s Committee.
Selection criteria for the competitive grant program required that each project be of national significance, demonstrate an urgent preservation need, have an educational or other public benefit, and demonstrate the likely availability of non-federal matching funds. The Rosa Parks bus qualified in all respects.
The restored bus was first exhibited at The Henry Ford’s “Celebrate Black History” program that began on February 1, 2003, and was a focal point of celebrations of Rosa Parks’ life and legacy when she passed away in 2005, as well as on her 100th birthday in 2013. It now stands as the pinnacle artifact in our With Liberty and Justice for All exhibit.
The President may be able to stop the federal government from observing Black History Month and take away a few of your days off work every year, but he and his army of mouthbreathing shitweasels and teenage broccoli-haired freaks sure as can’t stop us from celebrating these iconic figures. At a time when everything is in turmoil, rights are being trampled and the federal government is actively trying to genocide the trans community, we could all probably use a good reminder that even small acts of resistance can lead to big change, and even regular people can make history.