Park Metropolis Transit ‘reserving’ seats on buses for Rosa Parks for Black Historical past Month

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PARK CITY — They could have acquired second-class remedy as bus passengers again within the Nineteen Fifties.

However Park Metropolis Transit officers are symbolically reserving seats on the system’s buses this month for Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin, civil rights activists who helped spur the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. The symbolic gesture coincides with Black Historical past Month, February, and is supposed as a nod to variety, inclusion and respect for all cultures, stated Juan Cardona, outreach and advertising coordinator for the transit system.

“We hope this can encourage our riders to be taught extra concerning the Montgomery bus boycotts and Civil Rights Motion that these and different civil rights activists helped provoke,” reads an announcement of the initiative on the Park Metropolis Transit web site. Per the initiative, “Seat Reserved” indicators that includes pictures of Parks and Colvin and a short historical past of their efforts are posted at seats on Park Metropolis buses.

Parks and Colvin, much less well-known than her counterpart, refused to surrender their seats to white riders whereas on metropolis buses in Montgomery in separate incidents in 1955 and so they have been each arrested. Guidelines of the day required Black riders to sit down at the back of metropolis buses and to surrender their seats to white riders in the event that they acquired crowded.

The coverage and Parks’ arrest prompted Black prospects to boycott the town’s bus system as a type of protest. On the similar time, 5 Montgomery ladies, aided by the NAACP, sued in federal courtroom over the coverage and a federal choose dominated in 1956 that racially segregated seating on buses violated the U.S. Structure. The U.S. Supreme Courtroom upheld the ruling later that 12 months because the Civil Rights Motion steamed ahead.

Cardona estimates the signage honoring the 2 civil rights icons is on about 30 of the Park Metropolis system’s 45 or so buses, which provide free transportation in Park Metropolis. Parks died in 2005 whereas Colvin remains to be alive.

“It is simply to share one thing with the neighborhood and to have the ability to be taught one thing,” he stated.

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