Sixty-five years ago this week, Rosa Parks rocked the segregated South by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.

The milestone has been commemorated multiple ways this week in the city where the modern civil rights movement began – a city that now has its first-ever Black mayor.

The Mayor of Montgomery Steven Reed speaks during a memorialization ceremony in honor of Rosa Parks on the 65th Anniversary of her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery Bus Dec. 1, 2020, on Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. A few of the other distinguished visitors in attendance were the Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett, Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative director and Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, Air Education and Training Command commander, who watched the event via live stream. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Charles Welty)

“It’s an honor to commemorate such a courageous woman whose act of courage and life of activism led to many of the accomplishments and things we take for granted today,” Mayor Steven Reed said during a ceremony Tuesday at Maxwell Air Force Base, where local officials and dignitaries and Air Force leaders unveiled a sculpture of the woman who many describe as the mother of the modern civil rights movement.

In 1955, when Parks took her courageous stand, she was working at desegregated Maxwell Field as a seamstress. Her husband, Raymond, also worked at Maxwell as a barber. It is where the two first experienced what a desegrated community could look like.

“You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up. It was an alternative to the ugly policies of Jim Crow,” the late Parks stated in her memoir.

Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett attended the Maxwell commemoration, along with  Col. Eries Mentzer, 42nd Air Base Wing commander, Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, and others. The Rosa Parks sculpture was created by Ian Mangum, a 42nd Force Support Squadron team member.

Secretary of the Air Force Barbara M. Barrett joins 42d air Base Wing Commander Colonel Eries Mentzer, Montgomery Mayor Steven L. Reed, and other dignitaries in unveiling a memorial honoring Rosa Parks on the 65th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dec. 1, 2020. Ian Mangum created the sculpture of Parks, who had worked at the Maxwell Field Guest House prior to her refusal to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus. (US Air Force photo by Melanie Rodgers Cox)

“Sixty-five years ago today, a woman about my age refused to give up her seat on a city bus in protest of segregated transportation in Montgomery. That woman was Mrs. Rosa L. Parks,” Mentzer said. “She was not tired, she was tired of giving in. Her moral courage in that moment sparked a movement that changed our nation for the better.”

“Today, we salute Ms. Rosa Parks, once as a civilian member of the United States Army Air Corps and forever a civil rights icon,” Barrett said. “On that cold December 1st, the diminutive, bespeckled, 42-year-old Rosa Parks took a stand by keeping her seat. Her simple ‘no’ sparked a movement for equanimity in America.”

The event at Maxwell also marked the start of a 382-day partnership between the Air Force base and the city of Montgomery that will center on diversity and inclusion. The Freedom to Serve Initiative will focus on identifying and finding solutions to obstacles that may impede Airmen’s success.

Bryan Stevenson, Equal Justice Initiative director, speaks during a memorialization ceremony in honor of Rosa Parks on the 65th Anniversary of her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery Bus Dec. 1, 2020, on Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The event featured an unveiling of a new Rosa Parks sculpture created by Ian Mangum, a 42nd Force Support Squadron team member. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Charles Welty)

The time frame for the partnership coincides with number of days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The nonviolent mass protest began on Dec. 5, 1955, four days after Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person. It ended more than a year later, on Dec. 20, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws that called for segregated seating on public buses. The boycott, which introduced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the world stage, also demonstrated the effectiveness of nonviolent protest in challenging racial segregation. It is a tactic that would be used again and again during the civil rights movement and continues to be used today in the ongoing struggle for social justice and racial equality.

“It’s an honor to commemorate such a courageous woman whose act of courage and life of activism led to many of the accomplishments and things we take for granted today,” Reed said. “We hope that by partnering with Maxwell Air Force Base … we can share in ways that we can all be more inclusive and we can all do things to match … to live up to … the legacy and responsibility of Ms. Rosa Parks.”

This week, Reed also unveiled a plan to rename West Jeff Davis Avenue in Montgomery Fred D. Gray Avenue, in honor of the civil rights attorney who represented Parks and the Montgomery Improvement Association, which coordinated the bus boycott. Gray, who grew up on West Jeff Davis Avenue and has been involved in numerous, important civil rights cases, continues to practice law in Tuskegee. The street name-change would require the approval of property owners, as well as the city planning commission and city council.

Multiple, additional events have been taking place all week in Montgomery in honor of Parks, with more events scheduled through the weekend. To learn more about the events, visit www.mgmbusboycott.com.

Col. Eries Mentzer, 42nd Air Base Wing commander, is joined by Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett and other distinguished visitors Dec. 1, 2020, for the unveiling of a Rosa Parks memorial sculpture. Many people may know of the work Rosa Parks did during the civil rights movement, but less may know she worked on Maxwell Air Force Base in the 1940s. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Charles Welty)