Tribute to Courage
By Kathleen Walls

Montgomery has many fine museums but one stands out. It is not dedicated to some famous scientist or explorer. It doesn't honor someone with an exceptional talent like a painter or sculptor. It doesn't tell of events clouded by the midst of time.

No, this museum honors an average person who acted on her convictions to become an extraordinary symbol of courage for those around her and future generations. This museum tells the story of Rosa Parks, a middle-aged seamstress who earned her living working in a downtown department store altering clothing bought by people with more money and status than herself. It happened here. It happened in our own times. These events are fresh from the news stories of my own time. They began on December 1, 1955. The Rosa Parks Museum and Library, like the lady who's courage it honors, is unforgettable!

You enter and see memorabilia. Items like Montgomery County Deputy sheriff, Captain Frank Kennedy's, motorcycle jacket, badge, desk name plate and life magazine photos of him. Capt. Frank Kennedy was a motorcycle patrol officer during the bus boycott in and patrolled and protected the pickup and drop-off points used by the car poolers and makeshift taxies during the bus boycott in Montgomery.

When you enter the "next stop" in the museum, the memorabilia becomes more focused. You are surrounded by newspapers and pictures of the "main characters" and background in this drama. You get the feeling of what it was like to be an African-American in the mid-twentith century south. You are a second-class citizen from the moment of your birth. Not because of any action of yours. It is just because your skin is darker. A film leading you to Rosa'a courageous act of defiance shows and then stops at the crucial moment when Rosa enters the bus. Large doors open to a scene of a bus stop and a ordinary bus that is becoming more crowded. You are viewing as if standing on the sidewalk looking through the bus windows.

This is the actual bus not the one you see at the musuem

As the bus fills with people, the "white" seats in the front of the bus fill up. The next passenger, a white man stands in the aisle near Rosa who is seated in the first "Black" seat. She is tired. Tired after a hard work as a seamstress at Montgomery Fair Department Store where worked. She was tired also of being treated as a second-class citizen just because of the color of her skin. The driver gruffly orders Rosa to vacate her seat so that that white man standing in the aisle can sit down. Rosa refuses.

"No" she replies in a gentle voice.

The driver, Bruce, threatens her with arrest. I can call the police."

"You may do that," is her quiet reply that touched off the beginning of the battle for civil rights that spread like a raging wildfire from Montgomery across the nation.

Your "last stop" in the museum portrays the highly organized effort of the civil rights workers to provide support for the African Americans who took part in the bus boycott in Montgomery.

I think you will leave this museum as I did, amazed at what one "ordinary" woman could accomplish just by one simple action.

http://montgomery.troy.edu/ROSAPARKS/MUSEUM/