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Members of the Sarah Keys-Evans Planning Committee under the auspices of the Eastern Carolina Christian College and Seminary will celebrate the 92nd birthday of Sarah Keys Evans Sunday at 1 p.m.  

The celebration will be held at the Sarah Keys-Evans Plaza located at Virginia Avenue and Wyche Street.  

The public is invited to attend and tour the plaza. Guests are asked to abide by social distancing and facial covering guidelines. 

Guests are also asked to bring a lawn chair. 

The Sarah Keys-Evans Plaza was unveiled on August 1 — 68 years from the date Keys was arrested in Roanoke Rapids for not giving up her seat to a white Marine.  

The Sarah Keys-Evans Project Planning Committee was instrumental in acquiring the funds to construct the plaza.  It was funded by a grant provided by the Public Arts Inclusive Project of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. 

With this grant, Eastern Carolina Christian College and Seminary collaborated with other community organizations to tell the story of Keys-Evans. 

She was a young African American woman in the Women’s Army Corps, who refused to move to the back of an interstate Bus in Roanoke Rapids on August 2, 1952.  

Roanoke Rapids police arrested her.  

Keys-Evans' legal battle was seminal in the fight for equal rights.  

The resulting breakthrough civil rights case, Keys v. Carolina Coach Company of 1955, was the first occurrence in which the Interstate Commerce Commission broke with its history of adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine.  

The ruling was publicly announced six days before Rosa Parks’ historic defiance of Jim Crow laws on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts of 1955.  

“While the story of Sarah Keys-Evans has been eclipsed by the events in Montgomery, her activism was a necessary step and key success in ultimately dismantling Jim Crow transportation laws in the South in 1961,” the committee said.