It’s the 67th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ infamous protest that changed the course of history.
On December 1, 1955, Parks made the ultimate decision to be still in protest by refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man.
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Following Parks’ refusal to get out of her seat, she was then arrested for violating a law that segregated public buses. Parks’ protest fueled a fire throughout Montgomery, Alabama, which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and dealt a significant financial blow to bus companies in the area, according to the NAACP.
The bus in which that stand was taken on in Montgomery, Alabama, now resides at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan, giving people all around the world the opportunity to see it. It’s quite an interesting story how the bus ended up there.
It was difficult to decipher the authenticity of the bus when it was being searched for because “the bus identification number was not recorded in any official documents when Rosa Parks was arrested,” according to the Henry Ford website.
When bus #2857 was retired in the early 1970s, Roy H. Summerford of Montgomery bought it. At the time, company employees told him that it was the Rosa Parks bus. Summerford and his descendants kept the bus in a field and used it to store lumber and tools. When Summerford passed away, the bus became the property of his daughter and son-in-law, Vivian and Donnie Williams. Although the Williamses knew that this had been identified as the Rosa Parks bus, they had no documents to prove it.
Robert Lifson, President of Mastronet, an Internet auction house, decided he wanted to auction off the bus for Mr. and Mrs. Williams. He began a search for documents authenticating the bus—and he found one.
The Henry Ford website
It was announced over 20 years ago that the famous bus Rosa Parks changed history on would be auctioned off, and members of the Henry Ford Museum caught wind of the news through the Wall Street Journal.
Soon after they investigated and were convinced that it was the famous bus, the Henry Ford Museum staff began to bid for it. The bid began at $50,000, but the staff ended up paying $492,000, beating out notable bidders such as the Smithsonian Institution and the City of Denver, according to the Henry Ford website.
After the museum’s acquisition, the next step was to begin the process of restoring the vehicle to its original state, which started another bidding war about who would have the opportunity to do so. The Henry Ford Museum decided to let MSX International, an automotive services firm based in Southfield, Michigan, take on the tasks and it cost more than $300,000.
Museum and MSX employees researched every detail of the bus so that the restoration would be truly authentic. Original material was reused wherever possible and original parts from identical 1948 GM buses were used when necessary. Our goal was to restore the bus to its condition in 1955—a seven-year-old urban transit coach.
The Henry Ford website
According to the Henry Ford museum website, the Rosa Parks bus project received a whopping $205,000 through the Save America’s Treasures Program to help assist the restoration.