Rosa Parks will be honored with a commemorative stamp on what would have been her 100th birthday, Feb. 4. The U.S. Postal Service will host a pair of unveiling ceremonies for the stamp at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. The Wright Museum will be the first to sell the “Rosa Parks Forever” stamp to event-goers after a dedication ceremony starting at 7:30 a.m. Large crowds are expected to attend both events as a part of a celebration named The National Day of Courage.
The Henry Ford Museum is home to the bus that Rosa Parks made history on in December 1955. Her refusal to move to the back of the bus for a white customer violated Jim Crow laws in Montgomery, Ala., and sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the most pivotal demonstrations of the civil rights movement. Parks moved to Detroit with her husband Raymond two years later, and lived in the city until she died in 2005 at the age of 92.
“Stamp collectors and other people travel to events like this because they want to be part of history,” Don Neal told USA Today. Neal is a editor of Reflections, a newsletter that focuses on stamp collections about black people. “All of these things have value to collectors. It’s kind of a neat thing to go to.”
