Macon unveils Rosa Parks Square, honoring woman who ‘changed the world’

Macon-Bibb County dedicated the newly constructed Rosa Parks Square Wednesday, capping the $2.5 million project that sits across from city hall in downtown Macon.

Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in 1955 “was the spark that changed the world,” Henry Ficklin, Macon-Bibb County’s Executive Director of Community Affairs, said at the dedication, which was also livestreamed. Despite the rainy weather, which forced the ceremony to be held in City Hall, the park was dedicated on Parks’ Feb. 4 birthday.

The space has been a long time coming for Macon, Mayor Lester Miller said in his address. Initial planning for the park started under former Mayor C. Jack Ellis and was continued by former Mayor Robert Reichert, who ultimately doubled the intended size of the park in 2012.

Since construction started in 2024, the area has been reformed with seating, shade trees and an awning that covers a “reflection area,” according to plans released at the outset of the park’s construction.

Andrea Cooke, the board chair of the Friends of Rosa Parks Square organization, said Wednesday that the ceremony was not an end to the project but an opportunity to focus on the “legacy that lives not just in monuments or moments but in the courage we choose again and again.”

The park has already been used for one of the purposes that Alex Morrison, Macon-Bibb County’s director of planning and public spaces, stated in his address: protest. The Middle Georgia chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America organized a protest through downtown last week that began and ended in Rosa Parks Square.

Rosa Parks Square remains unfinished, Cooke said, as the Community Foundation of Central Georgia seeks additional artwork and a sculptural centerpiece that is planned to sit at the corner of First Street and Poplar Street.

“That square exists because people across this community believed that public space matters, that beauty matters, that Black history belongs at the center,” Cooke said. “Healing happens when we create spaces where people can gather, rest, protest, celebrate and simply be.”