According to NBC News, the monument will be the first statue of a woman on the Capitol lawn. Alabama Rep. Laura Hall, who sponsored the 2019 legislation that authorized the project, said that visitors see “the full picture” of the state’s past, not just the chapters written by men or those who defended the Confederacy.

Known around the world as the mother of the modern civil rights movement, Parks transformed history on December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery. Although she was not the first to resist bus segregation, Parks’ action became the turning point. Nine months earlier, on March 2, 1955, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin and several other women — including Aurelia Browder, Mary Louise Smith, and Susie McDonald — were also arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up their seats. Their names may not have become as well-known, but their courage helped build the foundation. In fact, their arrests later formed the basis of the federal court case Browder v. Gayle (1956), which ultimately struck down bus segregation as unconstitutional.

Still, it was Parks’ arrest on December 1, 1955 that officially ignited the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, led in part by a young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Parks continued her activism long after the buses were desegregated. She moved to Detroit in 1957, where she worked for Congressman John Conyers and advocated for affordable housing, police accountability, and Black political empowerment. Throughout her life, she supported youth education programs and anti-poverty efforts. When she died in 2005 at age 92, she lay in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, becoming the first woman in American history to receive that distinction.

The new statue will face Dexter Avenue, the very street where Parks boarded that bus nearly 70 years ago. It sits across from a monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

The project has been more than six years in the making. Lawmakers, artists, and historians collaborated through the Alabama Women’s Tribute Statue Commission to ensure the monuments reflect the courage and humanity of the women they honor.

In addition to Parks, a statue of Helen Keller, the renowned author and disability rights advocate, will also be unveiled, completing a recognition of two Alabama natives whose determination changed the course of history.