MONTGOMERY, Ala. ( WIAT ) — The Equal Justice Initiative has unveiled a new sculpture of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in Montgomery.
The EJI debuted the new sculpture across the street from its Legacy Museum. The sculpture is the first of three statues that will be set up in the plaza in the coming months, including ones of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis.
Parks, a longtime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was known for one day on December 1, 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a Montgomery bus, where Black residents typically were forced to sit. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, which led to Browder v. Gayle in 1956, which ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
Parks, who was born in Tuskegee, left Alabama for Detroit not long after her arrest, where she died in 2005 at the age of 92. In 1992, she wrote an autobiography on her life, “My Story.”
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