Next stop, preserving history. Along the 950 block of East Rosedale St. sit staples of the historic southside: Mt. Zion Baptist Church and Southside Community Center. Just across the street, not far from the bus stop, is a new bright orange bus with no wheels.
The bus has been taken apart and cut into pieces to create a history stop.
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WATCH HERE“The material in the bus include an actual physical bus,” artist Christopher Blay said. “The frame was fabricated to fit the different sections of the bus… to allow people to come in and experience what's happening. And it's an opportunity to take a moment with history.”
Blay is the mind behind the East Rosedale Monument Project.
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“It started as an application (in 2014) to the Public Art Project from Fort Worth Public Art Commission. I was one of three finalists, and I was the artist that was selected to create something for this neighborhood,” Blay said.
More than a decade later, his vision became reality and now has a permanent home on the sidewalk across the street from where the National Juneteenth Museum will be built.
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“Seems to be one of those moments of destiny,” Blay said.
Inside the bus, visitors embark on a journey to read about the fight to end racial segregation. Pictures and summaries of key moments including the uprising in Mansfield to desegregate its school system and the Montgomery Bus Boycotts in the 1950s as well as the role of Freedom Riders in the 1960s.
“Even locally just segregated buses where people couldn’t take city busses to where they needed to go,” Blay said. “So, this sort of pedestrian mode of transportation plays a really important part in the background, but an important and significant part in how the civil rights movement happened in the U.S.”
Blay included national leaders who helped fight for equality and justice but also made it a point to highlight the local ties.
“L.Clifford Davis, an attorney here that fought for desegregation. There's a panel there talking about his challenge to Mansfield ISD,” Blay said.
Davis was a pioneering civil rights lawyer and former state judge. In 1954 Davis became one of only two African American attorneys in Fort Worth. In 1956, Davis filed a federal lawsuit which would eventually result in the integration of Mansfield public schools. In 1959, we won another lawsuit that forced the integration of schools in Fort Worth.
“Ms. Opal Lee, who is a resident of this neighborhood, is also featured,” Blay said. “I am hoping that one of these warmer days she'll find her way out here to take a look at this.”
Dr. Marthin Luther King Jr’s work is also recognized.
“Dr. King visited this neighborhood. (He) couldn't speak at churches because of the threat of bombing of those churches if he appeared,” Blay said. “So, he was invited into the neighborhood.”
The future of the nation, Blay said, are the silhouettes of riders represented on the windows of the bus.
“They're children and parents from the KEEN group,” Blay said.
KEEN or Kids Environmental Education Network is a nonprofit organization focusing on programs and education for underserved youth across Tarrant County.
“These are young photographers,” Blay said. They do more than photography, but they carry cameras around and document their own neighborhoods.”
The art piece even features a bus scroll for a poem commissioned by Blay.
“I was trying to find someone to create a poem about the neighborhood and about this place,” Blay said.
Blay learned about the work of 2023 Youth Poet Laureate of Tarrant County, April Pelton.
“It's such a beautiful tribute,” Blay said.
The poem is titled “My Southside, Our Community”.
It reads:
My Southside, Our Community
A place abounding in love,
From the people around us to the skies above.
Where the smell of soul fills your nose,
And goodness are the seeds we sow.
This one street is connected,
Many others beautifully intersected.
For the community here is proud and bold
With inspiring stories deserving to be told.
Blay hopes those driving by will be curious enough to stop and connect with history.
“History is history. It's an objective fact,” Blay said. “These things happened and occurred, and it's a way of just sort of putting today and, every period in our history really, into perspective.”
