Parks speaks in front of the Alabama State Capitol on March 25, 1965.
Matt Herron / Jeannine Herron and Stanford University Libraries via AP file
By The Associated Press
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Seven decades after Rosa Parks was thrust indelibly into American history for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, new photos of the Civil Rights Movement icon have been made public for the first time, and they illustrate aspects of her legacy that are often overlooked.
The photos were taken by the late Civil Rights photographer Matt Herron, and they depict Parks at the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 — a five-day-long, 54-mile (87-kilometer) trek that is often credited with galvanizing political momentum for the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965.
History lessons tend to define Parks by her act of civil disobedience a decade earlier, on Dec. 1, 1955, which launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On Friday, some boycott participants and many of the boycott organizers’ descendants gathered to mark 70 years since the 381-day struggle in Alabama’s capital caught national attention, overthrowing racial segregation on public transportation.
The never-before-seen photos released to the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery in December 2025, taken a decade after the boycott, are a reminder that her activism began before and extended well beyond her most well-known act of defiance, said Donna Beisel, the museum’s director
“This is showing who Ms. Parks was, both as a person and as an activist,” Beisel said.
There are plenty of other photos placing Parks among the other Civil Rights icons who attended the march, including some that were taken by Herron. But others were never printed or put on display in any of the photographer’s numerous exhibits and books throughout his lifetime.
Herron moved to Jackson, Mississippi, with his wife and two young kids in 1963 after Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated. For the next two years, his photos captured some of the most notable people and events of that time. But in most of his photos, Herron’s lens was trained on masses of everyday people who empowered Civil Rights leaders to make change.
Herron’s wife, Jeannine Herron, 88, said that the photos going public this week were discovered from a contact sheet housed in a library at Stanford University.
The photos weren’t selected for print at the time because they were blurry or included people whose names weren’t as well known in Parks’ case, the new photos show her sitting among the crowd, looking away from the camera.
Now, Jeannine Herron is joining forces with historians and surviving Civil Rights activists in Alabama to reunite the work with the communities that they depict.
“It’s so important to get that information from history into local people’s understanding of what their families did,” Jeannine Herron said.
