Rosa Parks honored in Macon park bearing her name

Sixty-one years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on an Alabama bus, a handful of people gathered in downtown Macon at the park bearing her name.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks “sat down and gave a lot of people the courage to stand up, and stand we did,” former Macon Mayor C. Jack Ellis said to a dozen or so members of the Martin Luther King Jr. Commission at First and Poplar streets.

A boycott of the Montgomery bus system started four days later and lasted more than a year. It was a key event that unleashed the struggle for racial equality and helped propel King onto the national stage.

Elaine Lucas, a Macon-Bibb County commissioner, said it’s important to remember the actions of people like Parks.

“We with the Martin Luther King Commission are so afraid that history is being forgotten,” she said. “Part of what we want to do is join in efforts like this to make sure history, black history is not forgotten. Because black history is a part of all history.”

During the 3 p.m. ceremony, a red, white and blue wreath was placed by the concrete sign in Parks’ honor.

Ellis said he’d meant to lay a wreath last year but traveled to Montgomery instead to speak.

“I hope we will do this each and every year as the park is renovated,” Ellis said. “We still have work to do, but we’ve come an awful long way from those dark days in 1955.”

A Macon woman also played a big part in the success of the Alabama bus boycotts.

Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, printed up to 35,000 leaflets on a mimeograph machine to help advertise boycotts, Ellis said.

“She got students and they worked all night,” Ellis said. “It was distributed throughout the city of Montgomery to announce the boycott because they were afraid to do it over the air.”

It wasn’t until 1962 that Macon’s bus system was desegregated, an event that came after weeks of protest here.

Ellis, who helped rename the park after Parks in 2005, remembers going to the movies, work and school as a 16-year-old in Middle Georgia.

“Of course I rode on the back of the bus like every other person, very, very obediently for many, many years,” he said. “But we finally had the barriers broken down in Macon as well, even though it was a bit late.”

This story was originally published December 5, 2016 at 4:59 PM with the headline "Rosa Parks honored in Macon park bearing her name."