Search results for: Rosa Parks

Located at Troy University at Montgomery Campus, at the same spot where Rosa Parks was arrested for her refusal to move to the back of the bus, the Rosa Parks Museum is a memorial and education center dedicated to the life of civil rights activist Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Learn about the social and political climates of Montgomery in the 1950’ as well as the events which led to the boycott and discover the courageous people who were behind it. Explore historical artifacts, such as police reports and court documents, an original 1950s city bus, a restored periodical station wagon, artworks and the original fingerprint arrest record of Rosa Parks. You will also witness the Parks’ arrest, meet Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, attend a civil rights meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, and view a life-size statue of Parks sitting on a bus bench. The Cleveland Avenue Time Machine will take you back to the 19th century, where you’ll witness how segregation affected daily life. Enjoy the current and permanent exhibits and participate in special events, such as Diversity Dialogue, Rosa Parks’ Birthday Celebration, and Female Activism Community Forum. Read more...

Rosa Parks Statue is standing in downtown Montgomery, AL, since it was unveiled on Dec 1st, 2019, 64 years after the day Parks got arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus. This arrest led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that challenged segregation on public buses. The bronze statue is located near the bus stop Parks used to board the bus. The Alabama State Capitol can be seen at the background of the statue, and a few minutes’ walk from the statue is the Rosa Parks Museum. Next to the statue stand four granite markers for the four women who were the plaintiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case – Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith – which led to the cancellation of segregation on public buses. Smith participated in the unveiling ceremony. The statue was created by Montgomery County artist Clydetta Fulmer, who also sculptured the statue of General Richard Montgomery standing in front of Montgomery City Hall, and Helen Keller Statue located in Alabama Public Library Service. Fulmer created the statue from photographs of Parks. Among the 400 people and activists who attended the unveiling ceremony was the attorney Fred Gray, who defended Rosa Parks at the Browder v. Gayle case, as well as many civil rights activists who fought segregation. Read more...

Rosa Parks memorial stands in the heart of the Essex Government Complex in Newark, New Jersey. It is the first and only statue of Parks in New Jersey, and she is the only woman honored with a statue in this Complex. Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was a civil rights activist who got famous when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man on December 1st, 1955. Her act sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the founding events in US history against racial segregation in transportation. Parks devoted her life to fighting for the cause of equal rights. The statue was unveiled on October 1st, 2014, and was created by the Oregon artist, Thomas Jay Warren. The statue depicts Parks sitting on a bus seat, smiling, holding her purse. Her quote is inscribed on the seat next to her- “You must never be fearful of what you are doing when it is right.” More statues of Parks stand in – the US Capitol, Washington, DC, Montgomery, Alabama, Dallas, TX, and more. Read more...

On February 27th, 2013, Rosa Parks, the civil rights icon, made history again when her statue was unveiled in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall, the first full-length statue of an African American in the Capitol. Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was born and raised in Alabama. She lived on a farm, attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and studied at a rural school. Her mother taught her to sew at a young age, and she later became a seamstress. In 1932, she married Raymond Parks, a barber and member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Montgomery. Several years later, Parks also joined NAACP and became the secretary. On December 1st, 1955, Parks boarded the bus in downtown Montgomery and sat in the first row of the black section. When the white section of the bus went full, the driver ordered Parks and other passengers to give up their seats and move to the back. Parks refused. She was removed from the bus, got arrested, and convicted. Several days later, Montgomery community leaders launched the Montgomery bus boycott that ended after a year with the US Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Even though she faced many hardships and life threats as an activist, Parks never stopped advocating and fighting for equal rights. She passed away in 2005 and became the first woman and only the second African-American to lie in state in the US Capitol rotunda. Shortly after, the US Congress authorized the placement of her statue in the US Capitol, the first time since 1873. It is not part of the National Statuary Hall Collection and does not represent a state. Rob Firmin co-designed it with Eugene Daub, who also sculpted it, depicting Parks in bronze, sitting, wearing the same outfit she wore the day she refused to vacate her seat. The pedestal is made of Raven Black granite and inscribed simply with her name and life dates, “Rosa Parks 1913–2005.” President Barak Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the nation’s leaders participated in the unveiling ceremony alongside fellow activists and Parks family members. President Obama said: “Rosa Parks held no elected office. She possessed no fortune; lived her life far from the formal seats of power. And yet today, she takes her rightful place among those who’ve shaped this nation’s course.” Read more...

On the intersection of Broadway and West 46th Street stands one of the last landmarks of the historic Times Square, the I. Miller Building. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Israel Miller operated a shoe store, designing shoes for the greatest actresses of the time. His famous slogan hung outside “The Show Folks Shoe Shop—Dedicated to Beauty in Footwear.” In 1929, he decided to erect marble statues in the four niches on the building’s 2nd story and commissioned Alexander Stirling Calder for the work. The public chose an actress from the fields of drama, comedy, opera, and screen, and they are (from west to east): Ethel Barrymore as Ophelia in Hamlet; Marilyn Miller as Sunny in the 1925 hit musical of the same name; Mary Pickford as Little Lord Fauntleroy; and Rosa Ponselle, in her most famous role, as Norma in Bellini’s opera. These statues have been standing till these days after reconstructive surgery in 2012. They are among the several outdoor statues honoring real women in the heart of New York City. Ethel Barrymore (1879-1959) became known as “The First Lady of the American Theatre.” She was a stage, radio, and film actress for six decades. This statue depicts her in 1925 in the role of Ophelia in Hamlet she played on Broadway. A few blocks away, on 241 West 47th Street in the Theater District, stands the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which has been operating as a Broadway theatre since 1928. Marilyn Miller (1898-1936) was a well-known Broadway musical star of the 1920s and early 1930s. She performed on stage since she was five and made her Broadway debut at sixteen. Her statue depicts her as Sunny, the circus queen from the 1925 musical Sunny. She passed away at the young age of 37 from complications following surgery. Mary Pickford (1892-1979) was a Canadian-American stage and screen actress, producer, and businesswoman who co-founded Pickford–Fairbanks Studios, United Artists, and was one of the 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In her statue, she is depicted in her role in the 1921 film Little Lord Fauntleroy. Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981) was considered one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century. She was born to Italian immigrant parents in Connecticut and started singing from a young age in local venues. She made her Broadway debut at 18 and three years later at the Metropolitan Opera, where she continued singing till her unofficial retirement in 1937. Her statue portrays her as Norma, the role she performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1927. Read more...

In front of The Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago, IL, stands a larger-than-life bronze bust of the pioneering British chemist Rosalind Franklin. Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) graduated in 1941 with a degree in natural sciences from Newnham College, Cambridge. After researching coal at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association, she earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1945. The following year, Franklin took a postdoctoral research position at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat, where he developed expert X-ray crystallography skills. In 1951, she became a research associate at King’s College London. There, Franklin discovered the DNA properties, which led to the breakthrough in understanding the DNA double helix structure. In her lifetime, she did not receive the recognition she deserved. Sadly, while working on pioneering work on the molecular structures of viruses, she died of ovarian cancer at age 37. Four years before Crick, Watson and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of the helical structure of the DNA molecule. The Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in North Chicago was founded as the Chicago Hospital-College of Medicine in 1912, a night school for medical students. With time, more schools and programs in health-related fields were added and renamed several times. In 2004 it was renamed Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. As of 2022, the private graduate school has five schools Chicago Medical School, College of Health Professions, College of Pharmacy, Dr. William M. Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine, and School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. Sculptor Julie Rotblatt Amrany of Rotblatt-Amrany in Chicago was chosen by the university to create the statue honoring Franklin. On May 29, 2014, Martin Franklin, her nephew, and Rosalind Franklin Jekowsky, her niece, who serves as a trustee for the university, unveiled the statue in a special ceremony. The statue depicts Franklin in 1952, holding photo 51 in her left hand, an X-ray diffraction pattern of the B form of DNA that enabled the breakthrough in understanding the DNA structure. This image is also on the university’s seal and logo. This statue joins the few statues and memorials honoring real women in Chicago. Click here to see the list. Read more...

Rozalia Luksenburg (1871-1919) was born in Poland during the Russian Empire’s rule. While in high school, she became associated with socialist organizations and was involved in several workers’ strikes. Her action put her on the tsarist authorities’ radar, and Luxemburg fled Switzerland, where she studied politics, economics, history, philosophy, and mathematics at the University of Zurich. In 1897, at 26, she became the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in Economy. Luxemburg moved to Berlin and married a son of family friends to receive German citizenship. There, she became a prominent figure in the socialist movement and began to publish articles and brochures promoting Marxist theories and advocating a socialist revolution. In 1905, after the Russian revolution broke out, Luxemburg returned to Poland to join the fight against the Tsar. Within two years, she published more than 100 articles, pamphlets, and speeches in socialist papers, arguing that the revolution could only be successful through mass strikes. Once again, the tsarist authorities went after her and arrested her for three months. Upon her release, Luxemburg returned to Germany and worked for workers’ rights. In 1914, she and fellow revolutionist Karl Liebknecht founded the socialist and anti-war Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), spreading these ideas via the movement’s newspaper, The Red Flag. In 1916, she was arrested and incarcerated for two and a half years, though she never stopped writing, and her articles were smuggled out of prison and published. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were released only three days before the outbreak of the German Revolution of November 1918, in which the Spartacus League was actively involved. On 1 January 1919, the Spartacus League conjoined with other movements to establish the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Two weeks later, on 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were abducted by a German Cavalry unit that tortured, murdered, and then threw their bodies into the Landwehr Canal. Today, on that spot on the Lichtenstein Bridge over the canal stands the Rosa Luxemburg Memorial. The architects Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte designed and installed it in 1987. It comprises two parts – the name ROSA LUXEMBURG made of bronze block letters that point diagonally out of the canal, and a plaque on the opposite wall, detailing Luxemburg’s story. Other sites in Berlin commemorating Luxemburg are the Rosa Luxemburg Strasse and Rosa Luxemburg Platz in the Mitte district, the Rosa Luxemburg Statue in Straße der Pariser Kommune, the monument to the November Revolution Monument at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery that the Nazis destroyed, and the ‘From Fat Berta to Red Rosa’ monument at Bundesallee. Read more...

In front of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation building stands a statue of the renowned revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg. Rozalia Luksenburg (1871-1919) was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Poland. In high school, she became a member of left-wing socialist organizations and led several workers’ strikes in Warsaw. When the tsarist police came after her, Luxemburg fled to Switzerland, where she studied at the University of Zurich and became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Economy in 1897. That same year, Luxemburg moved to Berlin and continued promoting socialist agendas, writing articles and pamphlets, and advocating for workers’ rights. Luxemburg was a founding member of various political organizations, including the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and the anti-war Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), which later became part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Luxemburg also founded the newspapers of several of these organizations, where she published articles encouraging people to join the fight against the bourgeoisie. She was arrested several times for her actions. On 15 January 1919, following the Spartacus Revolt – a power struggle between the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Communist Party of Germany, Luxemburg and her fellow revolutionary Karl Liebknecht were abducted by a German Cavalry unit, tortured, and murdered. Her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal, found four months later, and brought to burial. In 1990, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation was established, affiliated with the democratic socialist Left Party. The foundation’s two main tracks are general political education activities and academic/scientific work. In 1999, they commissioned the sculptor Rolf Biebl to sculpt the Rosa Luxemburg statue that would stand at the entrance to the building. At first, it stood in front of the foundation’s office building at Franz-Mehring-Platz 1, and it moved when the foundation moved to its new location at Straße der Pariser Kommun. The statue was rededicated on 28 April 2021 – Worker’s Memorial Day, which honors the workers who died, were injured or became ill while and because of their labor. Unlike most statues, the life-size bronze statue of Luxemburg does not stand on a pedestal, but on the ground, at eye level with the people. She is depicted live and in movement, ready for the upcoming socialist revolution. Other places in Berlin commemorating her are Rosa Luxemburg Strasse and Rosa Luxemburg Platz in the Mitte district, the Rosa Luxemburg memorial at the Lichtenstein Bridge, where her corpse was thrown into the Landwehr Canal, the monument ‘From Fat Berta to Red Rosa’ at Bundesallee, and the November Revolution Monument at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery that the Nazis demolished in 1935. Read more...

The statue of the socialist revolutionist Rosa Luxemburg stands in Rosa Luxemburg Platz, a public park that was named in her honor. Rozalia Luksenburg (1871-1919) was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. While in high school, she became involved with socialist circles and became a leading figure in various workers’ strikes. Her political activities drew the attention of the tsarist authorities, and at 18, Luxemburg fled to Switzerland. There, she attended the University of Zurich, from which she later received a Ph.D., becoming the first woman to be granted a doctoral degree in Economy. Though leaving Poland at a young age, Luxemburg continued to support her motherland’s independence. She was a founding member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party, which later became the Polish Communist Party, and she established the socialist paper Sprawa Robotnicza (The Workers’ Cause). In 1897, Luxemburg moved to Berlin and married a son of family friends to become a German citizen. She became a dominant figure in the socialist movement and promoted Marxist ideas primarily by pen, publishing hundreds of articles on the subject. Upon the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1905, Luxemburg went to Poland to join the fight against the Russian regime and spread her ideas through articles, brochures, and speeches, arguing that a revolution could happen only through mass workers’ strikes. Again, she became wanted by the authorities, who arrested her for three months. After her release, Luxemburg returned to Germany and taught Marxism and economics at the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s Berlin training center. In 1914, as a reaction to WW1, Luxemburg and fellow revolutionist Karl Liebknecht founded the socialist and anti-war Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), and its newspaper, The Red Flag, in which she continued to call for a general strike. As a result, the two activists were imprisoned for two and a half years. Straight out of prison, she and Liebknecht established the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Under their leadership, the Spartacus League took part in the second revolutionary wave in Berlin – an armed uprising between the German government and the communist and socialist movements. Two weeks later, on 15 January 1919, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were abducted and murdered by German officials. Her body was thrown into the river, found, and brought to burial only four months later. Anke Besser-Güth created the Rosa Luxemburg statue in 1974. Initially, it stood at the former location of the district school of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (also known as the East German Communist Party) at Südpark. However, executives of the GDR regime of East Germany opposed the location and the interpretation of the statue, and they relocated it to its current site, which today is at Rosa Luxemburg Platz. The Bronze statue depicts Luxemburg sitting down with a book in her hand. The book symbolizes freedom of thinking and the courage to think differently. More places to visit while in Erfurt are the Old Synagogue, the oldest synagogue preserved in Europe, the Gothic St. Severi Church, The Museum of Thuringian Folklore, and the Andreasstrasse Memorial and Educational Center. Read more...

In 2001, Casino Luxembourg and the Musée d’Histoire de la Ville de Luxembourg invited the feminist activist and artist Sanja Iveković to participate in the exhibition “Luxembourg – the Luxembourg people. Consensus and restrained passions”. Iveković, born in 1949 in Zagreb, then part of Yugoslavia, was a prominent figure of the New Art Practice movement in Yugoslavia in the 1960 and 1970s. In her art, which includes photography, performances, videos, and installations, Iveković explores social issues with an emphasis on female identity, perception, and place in society. For her installation for the Luxemburg exhibition, Iveković chose to challenge the heroic masculinity depicted in many statues and memorials. She made a replica of the Gëlle Fra (the Gold Lady) monument in Luxemburg, the Monument of Remembrance, commemorating the victims of the two world wars by depicting a gilded figure of Nike, the Greek mythology goddess of victory. In Iveković’s version, Nike is visibly pregnant, and the words on the pedestal on which she stands were replaced with a text in English, German, and French, reading – KITSCH, KULTUR, KAPITAL, KUNST ((Kitsch, culture, capital, art) / LA RÉSISTANCE, LA JUSTICE, LA LIBERTÉ, L’INDÉPENDENCE (Resistance, justice, liberty, independence) / WHORE, BITCH, MADONNA, VIRGIN The installation was named Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, honoring the Marxist philosopher and socialist revolutionist Rosa Luxemburg, who was executed for her ideas and activism during the November Revolution in 1919. By naming the statue Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, Iveković deconstructs the symbolic, allegoric, and often anonymous representation of women in the context of war that denies the contribution of actual women. Instead, she shed light on real women who influenced history, warfare, and revolutions, as Rosa Luxembourg did. The pregnancy of the figure adds another layer to the humaneness and realism of women and emphasizes the polarized stereotypes of women, especially of the Madonna-whore dichotomy. At the time of the exhibition, the installation stood in the vicinity of the original Gëlle Fra memorial. Later, it was displayed in other locations, including the MoMA in New York City and the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg. Currently, the statue is not on display. Read more...