Sit With Rosa Parks - Two Of Her

Atlanta, Georgia

Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks is the rare statue-worthy figure whose most noble pose is sitting down, and not on a horse. Statue-makers usually render Rosa in her famous bus seat, with an adjacent empty sitting space to encourage human bonding.

The next step in this approach, and perhaps not the last, is "Continuing the Conversation," a bronze-and-granite sculpture unveiled on the campus of Georgia Tech on April 5, 2018. The sculpture has not one, but two sitting Rosa Parks, facing each other, one age 42 (the year of her bus protest), the other age 92 (the year of her death). In between the two women is an empty seat that beckons visitors to pose as if eavesdropping on the time-slip dialogue between middle-age and elderly Rosa.

The sculpture is by Atlanta artist Martin Dawe. Georgia Tech was the first major university in the Deep South to integrate without a court order, in 1961.