Detroit post office named in Rosa Parks’ honor

Detroit’s long-standing Grand River postal station was designated as the “Rosa Louise McCauley Parks Post Office” during a dedication ceremony on Monday.

A plaque commemorating Parks – a civil rights icon whose refusal to surrender her public bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 sparked one of the largest social movements in U.S. history, the Montgomery bus boycott – will be displayed in the post office. Located at 4744 Grand River Ave. on Detroit’s west side, the office is not far from Park’s former home.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit), sponsor of the House resolution that honored Parks with the designation, and U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (D-Bloomfield Twp.) attended the event. So did state Rep. Tyrone Carter (D-Detroit), who represents the community where the post office is located.

“I want people to be able to pass and see the name and say, ‘Who was that?’” said Tlaib. “That is the importance of making sure that we display not only her name…She was a beloved resident of the city of Detroit.”

Members of Parks’ family, Rhea McCauley and Renee Fussello, both nieces, also attended the event.

“This woman loved everybody. I miss her dearly,” McCauley said to Tlaib and Peters during the dedication event.

Tlaib’s U.S. House colleagues and Peters’ U.S. Senate colleagues approved the legislation, and President Joe Biden signed it into law on Dec. 19, 2022.

Peters pointed out that in 1957 Parks left Montgomery, Ala. for Detroit, where she would spend the rest of her life and for many years worked as an assistant to then-U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Detroit). She died on Oct. 24, 2005 at age 92.

“She had already earned the spotlight but she cared about the work,” Peters said about Parks’ civil rights activism that changed the United States and helped to redirect the course of history.

Parks’ legacy can be felt throughout the country. Biden has a bust of Parks in the White House Oval Office, alongside those for Martin Luther King Jr., former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and former U.S. attorney general and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.).

In 1996, then-President Bill Clinton gave Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The Detroit-based Rosa and Raymond Parks Foundation, founded in 1980, has raised more than $2 million in scholarships for high school students to attend colleges and universities.