Fort Worth drivers will notice something not from this era while riding down East Rosedale Avenue. In a striking fusion of history and art, an artist has breathed new life into a Civil Rights-era transit bus, transforming it into a monument that honors the wheels of change that rolled through America’s struggle for racial equality.
Christopher Blay is the artist of the new bus monument titled the East Rosedale Monument Project. Blay, who is currently the chief curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture, is originally from Liberia and moved to Fort Worth in 1992. He submitted his proposal to the Fort Worth Public Art Commission in 2014, back when he lived there.The commission asked for someone to create a prominent work of art along the street that has a relationship with the neighborhood.
“It’s so close to one of the bus stops here, and I thought, ‘Why not use a transit bus as a way of talking about both the local history and national history especially as it relates to Civil Rights?’ ” Blay said.
The monument is made out of a transit bus manufactured in the 1970s. The exterior of the bus is gray with orange, yellow, red and white stripes. Blay kept the original colors because he wanted to connect the materials of an actual bus to the concept of the monument. The windows of the bus show the silhouettes of kids from the neighborhood who are a part of the Kids Environmental Educational Network photography group. Blay did this to represent the shadows of history.
The interior of the bus consists of plaques telling the history of momentous occasions during the Civil Rights Movement. Some of these events include the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, Mansfield busing to I.M Terrell High School during segregation, and the Civil Rights demonstration that occurred in Fort Worth. Other plaques showcase the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” Opal Lee, and Brenda Polk carrying the banner for the first Martin Luther King Jr. memorial Fort Worth parade.
“The transit bus was this very pedestrian kind of conduit for a lot of the moments of the Civil Rights Movement,” Blay said. “If we think about the Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom riders, the policy of bussing students across the city for integration, you can see what a pivotal role the transit bus plays.”
The project has been in development for a decade, navigating challenges such as sourcing appropriate materials, finding a suitable fabricator and enduring delays exacerbated by the pandemic. Nevertheless, the memorial is now nearing completion and will soon open to the public.
Blay emphasizes that the memorial's crucial element is its location, situated across from the upcoming National Juneteenth Museum set to open in 2026. Additionally, the Civil Rights Movement, symbolized by the East Rosedale Monument Project, intersects with both history represented by the museum and contemporary issues, exemplified by the tragic 2019 killing of Atatiana Jefferson by Fort Worth police in her own home, located seven blocks away.
“The reason I call it the East Rosedale Monument Project is because it has this element of, like, an evolving experiment, the great American democracy experiment,” Blay said. “You know, moving towards a more perfect union. All these ideas that started way before 1865 and definitely way after 1965, we’re still kind of evolving and this monument project is kind of a testament to that.”
The East Rosedale Monument Project will be open by the end of this summer and is located at 920 E. Rosedale Ave.
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