Rosa Parks

In honor of Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday and our Day of Courage celebration earlier this year, the education team at The Henry Ford has developed a special educational activity book for children that focuses on social innovation and the way the civil rights moments.

Experience the Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks, as the citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, would have, through day-by-day newspaper clippings from the time compiled in a Montgomery city bus manager’s scrapbook.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a soft-spoken African American seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Learn how the bus on which Rosa Parks sat that day in 1955 was restored — going from a discarded relic in an Alabama field to one of the most popular artifacts in Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.

Rosa Parks turned a single act of defiance into a defining moment of the modern American civil rights movement.

We’ve just digitized a couple dozen photos of the Rosa Parks Bus before and during its 2002 restoration. The bus had been left in a field and used as a storehouse for decades, leading to significant condition issues.

On February 4, The Henry Ford is celebrating what would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday with a National Day of Courage. Find out what's in store.

Check out our book review of Jeanne Theoharis’ The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks--an exceptional work that offers real history beyond the myth of Parks as a tired seamstress.

This week on “The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation,” you’ll learn about Rosa Parks and the Rosa Parks Bus. Check out our resources to learn more about Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement.

Hear from a long-time member of The Henry Ford what a recent photograph of President Barack Obama sitting on the Rosa Parks Bus means to her.