Civil Rights: Time To Get Back On The Bus

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By Newsweek Editors

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It's every "Antiques Roadshow" enthusiast's dream. That old surplus bus Montgomery, Ala., resident Roy H. Sommerfield bought in 1970 and has been storing in the backyard for the last 30 years turns out to be the bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on Dec. 1, 1955. (A former dispatcher's scrapbook confirms that the bus--No. 2857--is authentic.) The artifact's worth: $492,000--which Dearborn, Mich.'s Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village dished out in October 2001 after winning an intense bidding war with several other institutions, including the Smithsonian. "We, of course, were delighted," says Ford museum director Steve Hamp. "It's arguably one of the most important objects in 20th-century America."

A little more than a year later, the museum's unveiling the restored bus (which had been gutted and used as a trailer by Sommerfield) as part of a civil-rights exhibit in honor of Black History Month. Since acquiring the artifact, the museum has restored it to the way it would have looked in 1955, when it was a seven-year-old urban-transit coach. "We wanted our visitors to be taken back to that exact moment in history," says Hamp. To do so, the museum spent more than $300,000 to re-create--then age--the bus so it would appear in the same condition it was in when Parks boarded it. Everything from the upholstery pattern to the colors of the company logo is historically accurate. Curator Bill Pretzer was so zealous in his attention to detail that he installed a vintage engine (although it will never be seen by the public) and filled the bus's wheel wells and tire treads with Montgomery's distinctive red dirt.

But attention to detail aside, what's amazing about the bus, Hamp says, is experiencing it firsthand. Visitors can board the bus and have their turn on the fifth row, where Parks once sat. "If we have to replace the seat covers every year, that's fine with me," Hamp says. "This is something that people should not only look at but understand through experience."

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