Barack Obama sits inside Rosa Parks bus

On 18th April 2012 President Barack Obama visited the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan and sat on the famed Rosa Parks bus, the Montgomery, Alabama city bus made famous by Rosa Parks.

Obama said he took the time to sit in the bus to "ponder the courage and tenacity that is part of our very recent history."

Rosa Parks (1913 – 2005) was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the U.S. Congress called "the first lady of civil rights", and "the mother of the freedom movement". On 1st December 1955 she refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. While Parks' action was not the first of its kind to impact the civil rights issue (others had taken similar steps, including Lizzie Jennings in 1854 and Homer Plessy in 1892), her civil disobedience had the effect of sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Her act of defiance became an important symbol of the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

At the time of her action, Parks was secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although widely honoured in later years for her action, she suffered for it, losing her job as a seamstress in a local department store.

In the photo below, Rosa Parks sat at the opposite end of the President, near the window, when she was arrested.



Seat layout on the bus where Parks sat



First page of police report lodged against Parks