New

monument

turns

Rosa

Parks’s

booking

number

into

warning

on

US

erasure

At the recently opened Montgomery Square in Alabama, bronze hands rise from the pavement, holding a placard against the sky. It reads 7053, the booking number displayed in Rosa Parks’s 1956 mugshot after she and other leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott were arrested.

Often with booking numbers and mugshots, the viewer is trained to see criminality before circumstance, guilt before resistance. But at Montgomery Square, a number meant to reduce Parks to an arrestee, has been remade into a monument to what her arrest exposed.

The square – an open plaza on Montgomery Street, where voting rights marchers passed in 1965 – is the newest of the four Legacy Sites that the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has built across the city. The EJI founder, Bryan Stevenson, an attorney who has spent four decades representing the condemned and the wrongly convicted, said he built the square because he had come to believe that Americans “haven’t even fully appreciated what happened just 70 years ago during the civil rights era”.