Revisit a critical moment in American history with the Rosa Parks bus at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan.

The day was December 1, 1955—not that long ago. The place was Montgomery, Alabama, aboard a 1948 General Motors transit bus operated by the city’s bus line. There, a courageous African-American seamstress and civil rights activist named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man, which was the law in the Jim Crow South at the time. And according to the law, she was arrested, fingerprinted, and charged. As Ms. Parks would later say, “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” With this heroic act of civil disobedience, Ms. Parks helped to launch the modern civil rights movement, which led, among other things, to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the end of legally prescribed  racial segregation in the United States.

You can easily make the case that any example of the first-generation GM transit bus—produced by the GM Truck and Coach Division from 1944 to 1969 and known as the “old look” city bus among historians—belongs on display at the Henry Ford Museum. With their advanced monocoque design and Detroit Diesel 71-series engines, these busses revolutionized public transportation in the USA. But in 2001, the museum acquired a very special one: the no. 2857 Montgomery city bus in which Ms. Park rode that historic day. Now authentically restored, the bus is one of the museum’s most beloved possessions. Here’s Mo Rocca, spokesman for The Henry Ford and host of “Innovation Nation,” to tell the story.