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.
