Seventy years have passed since Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, and yet the country still tries to shrink her into that single moment — a tired seamstress who’d simply had enough. Detroit, the city where she chose to continue her life, insists on remembering her differently. Not as an icon frozen in time, but as a Black woman whose lifelong organizing stretched from sexual violence cases in rural Alabama to open housing fights on Detroit’s west side. That fuller story  — truth beyond the myth — is exactly what the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation has fought to tell for 45 years.

The Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation (RPSF) has awarded more than $3 million in scholarships to more than 2,250 high school seniors since its founding by The Detroit News and the Detroit Public Schools (DPS) in 1980.

“Most people actually don’t know the story of Rosa Parks,” said Dr. Danielle McGuire, RPSF board member, historian and author of “At the Dark End of the Street”, whose research permanently shifted how historians write about Parks and the civil rights movement. “She’s so much more interesting, so much more radical, and so much more involved in all kinds of things that we forget about. We keep her stuck on the bus in Montgomery in 1955.”

According to Kim Trent, a  Detroit civic leader and former board president, the foundation, created through a racial discrimination lawsuit settlement involving Stroh’s Brewing Company, became one of the rare instances where federal accountability for racism produced long-term investment in Black futures.

Most people actually don’t know the story of Rosa Parks.”

Dr. Danielle McGuire

A judge, DPS and The Detroit News agreed the money should honor Parks — who was living in Detroit and working for Rep. John Conyers at the time — by funding scholarships for Michigan students devoted to service and social change.

It is a statewide program, reaching students from Detroit to Grand Rapids to rural school districts where scholarship dollars often determine whether higher education is possible at all.

That framing makes her legacy active, not ceremonial.

Read the full article about the Rosa Parks Scholarship Foundation by Ebony JJ Curry at The 19th.