---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 19:26:59 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Museum buys civil rights bus
Museum buys civil rights bus
Sat, 27 Oct 2001
A museum has bought the bus where civil-rights activist Rosa Parks refused
to give up her seat to a white man in 1955.
Michigan's Henry Ford Museum paid almost 343,000 for the bus at an
internet auction.
Parks was fined $10 for violating a city ordinance when she refused to give
up her seat.
Her arrest set off a year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses, bringing
national renown to a young Martin Luther King Jr and helping forge the US
civil rights movement.
The museum's Steve Hamp called the bus "the most important artifact in
civil rights history".
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.
Ray White, project manager for the Rosa Parks Museum and Library in
Montgomery, says the documentation that accompanies the bus shows it was
driven by James Blake, the man who had Parks arrested December 1, 1955.
Mr White, however, is still not certain it was the bus Parks had been on
when she was arrested.
He said: "The information I have is that they moved buses from route to
route. I'm not saying the bus isn't the bus, but I've not seen proof it was
the bus she was on."
Robert Lifson, of online auction company MastroNet, says he was skeptical
at first, but found newspaper articles kept by Montgomery bus drivers on
which they had scribbled the number of the bus that Parks was on and the
driver's name.
See this story on the web at http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_434582.html
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