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Seventy years have passed since Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, and yet the country still tries to shrink her into that single moment — a tired seamstress who’d simply had enough.

Detroit, the city where she chose to continue her life, insists on remembering her differently. Not as an icon frozen in time, but as a Black woman whose lifelong organizing stretched from sexual violence cases in rural Alabama to open housing fights on Detroit’s west side.

That fuller story  — truth beyond the myth — is exactly what the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation has fought to tell for 45 years.

The Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation (RPSF) has awarded more than $3 million in scholarships to more than 2,250 high school seniors since its founding by The Detroit News and the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) in 1980.

“Most people actually don’t know the story of Rosa Parks,” said Dr. Danielle McGuire, RPSF board member, historian and author of “At the Dark End of the Street”, whose research permanently shifted how historians write about Parks and the civil rights movement. “She’s so much more interesting, so much more radical, and so much more involved in all kinds of things that we forget about. We keep her stuck on the bus in Montgomery in 1955.”

According to Kim Trent, a  Detroit civic leader and former board president, the foundation, created through a racial discrimination lawsuit settlement involving Stroh’s Brewing Company, became one of the rare instances where federal accountability for racism produced long-term investment in Black futures.

A judge, DPS and The Detroit News agreed the money should honor Parks — who was living in Detroit and working for Rep. John Conyers at the time — by funding scholarships for Michigan students devoted to service and social change.

It is a statewide program, reaching students from Detroit to Grand Rapids to rural school districts where scholarship dollars often determine whether higher education is possible at all.

That framing makes her legacy active, not ceremonial.

“As part of her family, I feel grateful to be able to work together with my fellow board members to keep fighting for more opportunities to continue to provide scholarships,” said Erica Thedford, Parks’ great-niece and a foundation trustee. “I think Auntie Rosa would be extremely proud of what the Foundation has been able to achieve.”

The numbers tell one story — more than 1,000 scholars, millions awarded, forty $2,500 scholarships each year — and the essays tell another. Applicants must identify a modern social issue and explain how they would confront it using principles Parks embodied: discipline, non-negotiable dignity, community before self.

“Reading the essays of the students who apply is a great reminder that each person doing one act, no matter how small, creates a stronger network of love and kindness,” Thedford said. “Some of these students come from extreme hardship and still find the time and resources to volunteer at food banks, shelters… Some even take it upon themselves to be the organizer of ways to help the less fortunate at their schools.”

The award is one-time, not renewable, yet its impact stretches across decades.

“Once you become a Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation recipient, you are a Rosa Parks Scholar for life,” Thedford said. “These students are now part of a network of people who root for each other, and that kind of support system is important.”

Trent knows that firsthand: She was a Parks Scholar herself when she graduated from Cass Tech High School.

“I received the scholarship in 1987,” she said. “Ironically, not only did I get it, but my best friend… also received the same scholarship. And then her son got the scholarship like 30 years later.”

Trent said the scholarship’s origin mirrors Parks’ life — created in response to injustice and sustained through community action.

“It’s one of those rare occasions where something beautiful grew out of an instance of racism and oppression,” Trent said.

Over the years, some Parks Scholars attended community college. Others enrolled at flagship universities. All had to articulate how their education would serve a community beyond themselves.

Some, like Emmy-winning actor Courtney B. Vance, who’s from Highland Park, Michigan, went on to shape national culture. Others are now attorneys, educators and nonprofit leaders across the state.

“What gets lost in what she did is the reason she did it,” Trent added. “It wasn’t just so she could sit on a bus. It was because she was trying to open up opportunity for people who had been denied opportunity.”

That is the heartbeat of the foundation’s lineage.

Parks was not simply resisting segregation. She was rejecting the entire machinery that kept Black women from safety, education and economic autonomy.

McGuire’s research highlights how Rosa Parks was investigating sexual violence cases long before #MeToo, defending Black girls whose voices were dismissed in courtrooms and newspapers. She worked alongside the NAACP on equity cases. When she left Alabama under threat of death and moved to Detroit, she became the neighbor who knew everyone’s children, the church member who attended every meeting, the woman who collected information and names and needs.

“She was the person in the neighborhood who knew all the kids, who worked in almost every community organization you can imagine, to make life better for her people,” McGuire said. “The scholarship foundation is an example of that — just one of many.”

Every year, nearly 400 applicants encounter that fuller history — the Parks who fought for open housing in Detroit, who believed in Black self-determination, who, as McGuire notes, “never stopped fighting for equality and justice for people who didn’t have a voice that was being heard.”

That is not accidental. It is by design.

“We ask our applicants to become familiar with Rosa Parks and the tactics and strategies she used to make changes in her community and how they will do the same,” McGuire said. “I think it gives them hope. It links them to a tradition and a history of hope and change.”

This anniversary of Parks’ arrest arrives as school boards strip Black history from K-12 classrooms and as scholarship programs for marginalized students come under attack. Thedford sees the foundation’s work as a refusal.

“During this time, when we are hearing of funding being pulled from schools and programs that are needed to serve our youth, the Foundation is able to continue its provision of funds,” she said.

McGuire is blunt about what that represents:

“No matter how hard people try to cancel the past, the past is very much alive,” she said. “Rosa Parks’ history gives us so much honesty about America… and studying her is paramount to getting through any difficult time.”

Seventy years later, the lesson remains unchanged: Rosa Parks did not fight for a place to sit, she fought for the generations who would rise. Today, those students are still applying, still studying her strategies, still refusing to yield.

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The Equal Justice Initiative will soon open a third site in the Montgomery area memorializing victims of racial violence.

Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a 17-acre site  located on the banks of the Alabama River on the north side of Montgomery, focuses on American slavery. Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of EJI, said the site aims to convey the brutality and horror of American slavery, and the resilience and hope of those in it.

“With any honesty about the lives of enslaved people, it is not just Alabama, it is all across this country, that we don’t have a very extensive or developed record about the experience of being enslaved, about living through enslavement, and about the legacy of slavery,” he said on Monday.

The park is scheduled to open to the public by the end of the month.

Montgomery was a major center of slavery and the domestic slave trade. In 1860, — 66% of the population — were enslaved.  The city served as the first capital of the Confederacy. According to EJI, some 400,000 people were held in bondage along the Alabama River just prior to the Civil War. The nonprofit says that rail lines near the park were built by enslaved people in the 1850s, and were used in the buying and selling of human beings.

The Black community in the city maintained a long tradition of activism, leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965, both key events in the modern civil rights movement.

“Montgomery, for a long time, has defined itself as the Cradle of the Confederacy, the heart of Dixie, which means we are centered in a space that, in many ways, connects to the challenges that we are trying to address and educate people about,” Stevenson said. “But I also think Montgomery has an important role to play in leading the nation.”

The opening of the park is one of the most highly anticipated events of the year, so much so that featured

Freedom Monument Sculpture Park serves to complement and build on the themes that are present at the other two EJI sites located within the city. The Legacy Museum looks at the history of slavery, segregation and mass incarceration and explores their impact on Black Americans and the nation as a whole.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to national acclaim in 2018, honors victims of lynching in the United States. There are sculptures and features placed within the space that testify to the experiences of those who died and the impact it had for their loved ones.

“I still felt there was a need to have something that you could experience the legacy of slavery around,” Stevenson said. “I have been around to the plantations that exist in this country, and to be honest, I don’t think any really, honestly, present the story of slavery centered on the lives of enslaved people.”

The park is laid out in a circular path that traces the history of the institution of slavery and begins with the transatlantic passage of people kidnapped from Africa to be sold into bondage.

Visitors are presented with information about their ultimate destination in the country, from the south to even as far north as counties in New Jersey.

Further down the path, visitors encounter displays on how people were trafficked to Montgomery to be sold. There is a rail car on the grounds that people can walk into and experience how slaves traveled centuries ago.

The Freedom Monument Sculpture Park includes two 170-year-old dwellings from a plantation in Alabama where enslaved families lived for generations. The third dwelling is a replica that reveals the most common size and design of dwellings.

The site also includes a whipping post to give people a sense of the agony that people who were enslaved had to endure when they were punished.

Sculptures

The park features sculptures from different artists — many African American, African or indigenous — that focus on different aspects of slavery, from the brutality of bondage to the courage of the enslaved. The park is designed to mix art and history in depicting the struggles of those seeking freedom and justice.

One sculpture places fingers around a tree growing from the ground, was done by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber is called “The Caring Hand.” A second statue features two arms with one holding a club is called “Strike” by Hank Willis Thomas.

The park also includes bricks made by enslaved people 175 years ago that visitors will be able to touch, as well as chains used to traffic the enslaved.

The main attraction is a 50-foot-tall monument listing 122,000 surnames of the 4.7 million slaves living in the nation according to the 1870 Census, the first taken after slavery and the first that recorded the names of former slaves.

Visitors descended from enslaved people can use a website to trace where their ancestors lived. They can also stop by the visitor center to research the different locations where slaves lived and find the surnames of those who lived in those locations.

“The most extraordinary thing, I think, about people who were enslaved in this country is they are people who learned to love in the midst of sorrow,” Stevenson said. “I would not be here if my enslaved fore parents had not found a way to love in the midst of sorrow, to create something hopeful, like a family, like a future, despite the brutality.”

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Alabama’s unemployment rate currently sits at the lowest number in state history: 2.2%. 

But with just 51,445 unemployed workers in the state, according to the most recent data from , there are still about 126,346 open jobs in Alabama. 

Placing those numbers beside Alabama’s mediocre population growth data (4.82% growth since 2020), it’s clear that Alabama won’t likely be able to fill all of those openings with unemployed Alabamians or transplants from other states. 

Instead, some experts say the state should look inwards. Specifically,  that officials should turn to their schools.

In West Alabama, that is exactly what some Tuscaloosa leaders have been focused on since 2017: connecting education and industry to directly prepare students for the workforce while they’re still in high school. 

A partnership between the Tuscaloosa County School System, Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, the nonprofit West Alabama Works and  created a pilot program in modern manufacturing within Brookwood High School that has since been replicated in 24 schools across Alabama. 

It’s built around what they call modern manufacturing career and technical education (CTE), and across schools, the program educated nearly 400 students .

“The success of this program really goes into the industry,” Brookwood CTE Principal Tripp Marshall said. “Our center is a lot different than most high schools, I’d say, because we’re totally industry-driven. What we want to do here, what we want to become, what we want to grow our kids who are our products into is specifically industry-driven into what they need.” 

What students need to learn

Even though Brookwood is a blue collar town like many others in Alabama, Marshall said that when they started building out the program, he was shocked by how few technical skills kids have.

“Believe it or not, there are a lot of students in this generation of kids that do not know anything about tools,” he said. “That was the biggest crunch as far as what our industry needed, some kids that actually knew how to hold a hammer, and that’s what we gave them.”

The curriculum starts with the core skills from the : safety, hand and power tools, construction math, materials handling, construction drawings, rigging and employability. 

Then, students move on to train for certifications from the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council. These certifications have , and Marshall said the school also benefits from students earning them. 

The Alabama Department of Education, or proof that the student possesses the minimum skills required for entry-level employment.

“These generalized skills for an industry, for construction, weigh in heavy favor for our industry partners because they realized that if these kids don’t have these skills, they’re going to spend a lot of time and money trying to train them,” Marshall said.

How Brookwood got students to buy into the program

In the first year that Brookwood High School’s manufacturing program was up and running out of its shiny, new career annex, there were only 16 students enrolled. 

The program was perfectly designed with the contributions of industry partners, but Marshall and other school administrators had to actually find enough students to go through it. That’s when they turned to YouScience, a company that specializes in connecting students with the industries for which they are best suited. 

“The research has found that if you connect a student with a career outcome of any kind that’s personalized to them as an individual, their academic engagement rates and their academic performance all skyrocket,” YouScience CEO and founder Edson Barton said. “It boils down to kind of Psychology 101. Everybody needs a purpose, and if you don’t have a purpose for what you’re doing, then you lose interest.”

Students at Brookwood take the YouScience career test in the ninth grade, and by examining their aptitudes, the results point students to specific career sets that they may never have considered before. 

Barton said the YouScience test works beyond the capabilities of a standard interest survey, so it avoids pigeonholing students based on stereotypes and internal biases. 

Thus, instead of questions like “Do you like woodworking?” or “Do you enjoy taking care of others?”, the YouScience test has students complete a series of brain games to demonstrate whether they have aptitudes for skills like idea generation or numerical reasoning. 

When Brookwood students show a propensity toward manufacturing or engineering, counselors suggest they enroll in the CTE program. After the first year of testing, about 75 students tested with those aptitudes, and the program grew from its initial 16 students to 55.

Now, as the program looks to begin its sixth year, 180 students plan to take CTE classes. 

A student’s perspective

Three years ago, current Brookwood senior Mariana Zapata was one of the students who tested strongly for manufacturing. Her guidance counselor suggested that she enroll in the CTE program, but because she had always planned to go into the medical field, Zapata was unsure. 

She needed an elective credit, though, so she decided to give the class a chance. 

“I didn’t know anything about manufacturing. Like I didn’t know what the term was or anything, until I started taking the class and then learned that manufacturing is building and the processes of fabricating things,” Zapata said. “We would make projects, and we would work together in the classroom. It was more hands-on than any other class, so that’s what I really enjoyed about it.”

After her first year in the program, Mercedes-Benz offered Zapata a paid apprenticeship at its plant in Tuscaloosa. She spent her junior year working there three days a week, and it’s her summer job too. 

With the money Zapata earned at Mercedes, she was able to save up and buy her own car. 

“It took a while, but I was able to do it,” Zapata said. “I really enjoyed doing it and earned good money as a part-time job. I learned a lot about that industry that I wouldn’t have known if I’d never taken the class.”

While Zapata said she still plans to stick with her goal of pursuing a career as an ultrasound technician, she’s proud of the work she accomplished in the manufacturing program. She learned hard skills, helped get cars built and made enough money to achieve her goal. 

“It was an opportunity,” she said, “and I took advantage of it.”

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