KAT Honored Rosa Parks Day with a Reserved Front-row Seat on Every Bus

(December 2020) – This is the first year for Tennesseans to officially commemorate December 1st as Rosa Parks Day. Legislation sponsored by Tennessee Senator Raumesh Akbari and Representative Karen Camper was signed into law last year (2019). In Tennessee Rosa Parks Day will be celebrated on December 1st, the day she was arrested on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955.

Knoxville Area Transit paid tribute to Rosa Parks on Tuesday, December 1, 2020. One seat on every KAT bus was reserved with a placard that recognized Parks who took a stand by sitting down in the white section of a city bus.  that changed the course of history in the United States.

“Rosa Parks’s seemingly small act of courage in the fight for racial justice had enormous consequences,” says Isaac Thorne, Director of Transit for the City of Knoxville. “We honor that courage and the work of past civil rights leaders while recognizing the responsibility we all have to continue to advance efforts to achieve racial equity across our city and our nation.”

Rosa Parks sparked a revolution and ushered in the Civil Rights Movement when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Thursday, December 1, 1955. The 42-year-old seamstress and member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was arrested for disorderly conduct, jailed, and fined. Her defiant courage propelled the Montgomery Bus Boycott on December 5, 1955, and sparked nationwide efforts to end racial segregation on public transportation.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in” -Rosa Parks in her autobiography.

Rosa Parks is honored in many ways by public transit systems across the world:

• In 2004, the Los Angeles County MetroRail system officially named the Imperial Highway/Wilmington station, where the Blue Line connects with the Green Line, the “Rosa Parks Station”.
• In 2005, Metro Transit in King County, Washington, placed posters and stickers dedicating the first forward-facing seat of all its buses in Parks’ memory shortly after her death.
• The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) declared December 1, 2005, the 50th anniversary of her arrest, to be a “National Transit Tribute to Rosa Parks Day”.
• In 2006, Nassau County announced that the Hempstead Transit Center would be renamed the Rosa Parks Hempstead Transit Center in her honor.
• In 2009, the Rosa Parks Transit Center opened in Detroit at the corner of Michigan and Cass Avenues.
• In 2015, the new Rosa Parks Railway Station opened in Paris.

The first Rosa Parks Day was celebrated in California in the year 2000 on February 4th, which is Parks’ birthday. The date of recognition varies among states.