the Rosa Parks bus from Montgomery, Alabama

 

Below: President Barack Obama sits in the Rosa Parks bus, in the same row she was in, at the Henry Ford Museum after an event in Dearborn, Michigan, 18 April 2012. (The White House photo)

A segregated trolley in Atlanta in April 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in a South Carolina case, upheld a Federal ban on segregated buses.

This GM bus is an historically significant item in American civil rights history. On 1 December 1955 colored woman Rosa Parks boarded it in Montgomery City on her way home from work. As it filled and a white man entered in need of a seat, Miss Parks quietly refused. The driver, an obvious racist, had her arrested. News of this incident spread quickly and led to a city-wide bus boycott led by a young Martin Luther King, Jr. The city's bus services were legally integrated on 21 December 1956. This courageous action on a bus helped spark the modern American civil rights movement.

Decades later, that same bus was found lying unprotected and deteriorating in a field. When the Henry Ford Museum got hold of it, it was severely rusted, windows were broken or missing, and the seats and engine had been removed. Active corrosion and biological decay were affecting the major structural components of the bus, and large-scale treatments were needed to save as much of the original bus as possible before irreversible damage occurred.

In 2002, Save America's Treasures awarded the Henry Ford Museum a $205,000 Federal challenge grant to restore this iconic piece of history and return it to its 1955 physical appearance.

Bus specifications
TDH-3610, Serial # 1132, Coach ID #2857
General Motors Corp., Pontiac, Michigan
Delivered in March 1948
36 passengers
Diesel engine, Hydraulic transmission
Used in Terre Haute, Indiana, 1948-54
Used in Montgomery, Alabama, 1954-71
Sold as surplus to Roy H. Summerford, 1971
Purchased at auction by The Henry Ford, 2001

(Henry Ford Museum)