Rosa Parks’ Grave

The most famous person resting at Woodlawn never sought the spotlight — she just refused to give up her seat. Rosa Parks, the seamstress whose 1955 stand on a Montgomery bus helped ignite the civil rights movement, was interred here in 2005, and the cemetery’s Albert Kahn–designed chapel was renamed the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel in her honor.

Parks moved to Detroit in 1957 and spent nearly fifty years here — the long second act Montgomery rarely gets told — and she rests in a city that had been a destination for people seeking freedom for a century before her. On the Underground Railroad, Detroit was code-named “Midnight”: the last stop before the river crossing to Canada and the free shore beyond. Two chapters of one long story, a hundred years apart, both grounded in this same city — and her grave is one quiet place to feel that continuity. On our list.