GRTC also reserved the first seat on every bus in honor of Mrs. Parks refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white man. The action of Mrs. Parks, who died in 2005 in Detroit, led to a boycott of Montgomery’s public bus system and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawing racially segregated seating on local public transit just as it had earlier used the Virginia case of Irene Morgan to ban racial segregation of passengers on buses, trains and planes crossing state lines.
