By Todd Spangler
WASHINGTON – Details of a long-awaited tribute to Rosa Parks finally started to come out Thursday with a statue memorializing the civil rights leader set to be unveiled in the U.S. Capitol next week.
The monument in her honor will be 9 feet tall, with a bronze sculpture standing on a black granite pedestal that together weigh some 2,700 pounds. It will be unveiled during a ceremony Wednesday.
It was in late 2005 when Congress passed a resolution to place a statue of Parks – the African-American woman deemed the Mother of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, who helped set off the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott after being arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white passenger in 1955 – among the items in the U.S. Capitol Art Collection.
It was the first commission of a full-sized statue approved and funded by the Congress, instead of one of the states, since 1873, when Congress approved a statue of former Sen. Edward Baker, a senator from Oregon killed in the Civil War.
Parks died in Detroit, where she had lived for decades, in October 2005. President Barack Obama is expected to attend the unveiling Wednesday along with congressional leaders.
The statue will be the first full-sized representation of an African-American woman in the collection. In 2006, the Capitol accepted the donation of a bust of Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist and women’s rights activist, that stands in the Capitol’s Visitor Center.
The cost of the Parks’ statue was not immediately revealed. The Architect of the Capitol’s office said Thursday that it and the National Endowment for the Arts managed a national competition for the design, which was ultimately awarded in November 2009 to Daub and Firmin Studios LLC, based in Kensington and San Pedro, Calif. Eugene E. Daub was the master artist and sculptor and Rob Fermin was the project manager.
Daub has work in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum and elsewhere, and his firm’s recent commissions include those for Abraham Lincoln at his birthplace and Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia. Earlier works include the U.S.S. San Diego monument and monuments commemorating Lewis and Clark in Missouri and Montana.
Per the law passed in 2005, Parks’ statue will be installed in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol.
Contact TODD SPANGLER at 703-854-8947 or at tspangler@freepress.com.