The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit had already managed to buy the Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat...now AL.COM reports they are dismantling another historic Civil Rights related property in Alabama---Selma this time--- and moving it up North.
“It became increasingly clearer to me that the house belonged to the world, and quite frankly, The Henry Ford was the place that I always felt in my heart that it needed to be,” she (Jawana Jackson) told The Associated Press last week from her home in Pensacola, Florida.
The moving of the house is another loss for poor Selma, already struggling against abject poverty and recently devastated by a killer tornado. It is hard to object to the sale of the house by private owners, after all...Alabama had ample opportunities to buy and restore it but no one came forward.
The Ford Museum people quietly tracked down the Rosa Parks bus wasting away in a field near Montgomery and took it up North to restore it. Now they have bought and will move the house where Rev. King plotted Civil Rights strategy.
The state of Alabama may be more interested in preserving confederate symbols, with Kay Ivey's confederate protection law, than saving old houses with Rev. Martin Luther King connections.
Will we wait for Detroit to show up with some big trucks to move the bridge?
About the bus:
"The bus company sold it off in the 1970s, but the man who bought it had no documentary evidence that it was the Rosa Parks bus. Donna Braden, the museum's 'curator of public life', says: "The bus was really just a shell that he stored things in. He'd stripped the inside and thrown away all the seats."
When it came up for auction in 2001, the auction house knew vague family stories wouldn't quite cut it as evidence. Luckily, employees managed to track down a scrapbook put together by a bus station manager. He had collected a series of articles about the bus boycott
Braden says: "On one of the pages, which was right when the Rosa Parks incident happened, he wrote down the actual number of the actual bus and the name Blake - the name of the bus driver."
After comparing the number of the bus to check they matched up, and getting a forensics expert to authenticate the paper and handwriting, there was sufficient proof.
The Henry Ford put in the highest bid at auction, then spent over $300,000 restoring the bus. Original parts and furnishings were used where possible, while parts from identical 1948 buses were used to fill the gaps. Lovingly refurbished, the bus now stands unobtrusively amongst a sea of classic cars.
Almost 60 years on from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the doors of the vehicle where it started stand permanently open. Anyone of any race, gender or religion can step inside and sit down - in any seat they choose."
(Source: An article in an Australian newspaper. Read it HERE.)
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