Museum Buys Purported Rosa Parks Bus

A Michigan museum has paid $492,000 at an Internet auction for a bus whose owners say was the one on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1955.

Steve Hamp, president of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, called the bus “the most important artifact in civil rights history,” even as some wondered whether it is the actual vehicle.

Parks was fined $10 for violating a city ordinance when she refused to give up her seat. Her arrest set off a yearlong boycott of Montgomery’s buses, bringing renown to a young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and helping forge the civil rights movement.

No bus number was written down on police records when Parks was arrested, and there have been questions over the years as to whether it would be possible to identify the vehicle.

The bus sold at auction was bought in the early 1970s by a Montgomery man, Hubert Summerford, who used it to store tools. Summerford died in 1985, leaving the bus to his daughter, Vivian Williams, and her husband.

Ray White, project manager for the Rosa Parks Museum and Library in Montgomery, said the documentation that accompanies the bus shows it was driven by James Blake, the driver who had Parks arrested Dec. 1, 1955.

White said he’s still not certain it was the bus Parks was on.

“I’m not saying the bus the Williamses had wasn’t the bus. But I’ve not seen proof it was the bus she was on,” White said Friday.

Vivian Williams said she never had any doubt that it is the real bus.

“My father always said it was the bus and he had no reason to say that unless it was true,” she said.

Hamp said the Ford museum plans to restore the bus and put it on permanent display.