Rosa Parks: Bus company reserves every front seat to honour late civil rights icon

The activist would have been 103

The move was part of Black History Month (GRTC)

How better to honour the woman whose refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white customer helped spark a wave of momentum to the civil rights movement?

A bus company in Virginia took the opportunity to mark what would have been Parks’ 103rd birthday by reserving the front seat on all of its buses in her name. Electronic messages on the buses also displayed special messages to recall her actions.

The company reserved the front seat in each of its buses (GRTC)

“Ms Parks is most well-known for her act of defiance on a Montgomery, bus on December 1 1955 that changed the course of history. On that date, Ms. Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger,” said the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC).

“She was arrested and fined. Four days later, in response to Ms. Parks’ arrest, a year-long bus boycott began. It ended when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on public transportation was illegal.”

Rosa Parks seated toward the front of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 (Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

The company put commemorative signs on seats, which read: “It all started on a bus”. It also showed the now iconic photograph of Parks sitting towards the front of the bus.

Parks, known as the “mother of the freedom movement”, passed away at the age of 92 in 2005 and was the first woman whose body lay in state in the US Capitol.