On Dec. 1, 2020, exactly 65 years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, the city and Air Force leadership unveiled a monument to her memory on Maxwell AFB. Rosa Parks worked as a seamstress at Maxwell’s on-base hotel in 1941. Her husband, Raymond, worked at the base barber shop. The base is in Montgomery.
It was her time as a civilian at Maxwell Field that offered a vision of different way of living than the racism of the segregated South, she says in her biography. “You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up,” she wrote. “It was an alternative to the ugly policies of Jim Crow.”
Made from powder-coated steel, the lines and cut-out shapes of the monument combine to form an image of Parks’s face and was intentionally erected in an open field that meets a crosswalk where children typically cross daily when school is in session.
The monument was designed by a base civilian, Ian Mangum, the 42nd Force Support Squadron assistant logistics superintendent. He said the vertical bars that make up the memorial were made to resemble weapons to symbolize Rosa Parks’ role in the civil rights movement as a weapon of change
