ROSA LOUISE PARKS | 1913-2005: Good-bye, Mrs. Parks

October 25, 2005

BY CASSANDRA SPRATLING

When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights as human beings.

Her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man was a simple act that took extraordinary courage in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. It was a place where black people had no rights that white people had to respect. It was a time when racial discrimination was so common, many blacks never questioned it.

At least not out loud.

But then came Rosa Louise Parks.

Jim Crow had met his match.

Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, died about 7:20 p.m. Monday at her home in the Riverfront Apartments in Detroit.

"She went away peacefully," said her longtime friend and spokesperson, Elaine Eason Steele. Steele and Parks' physician, Dr. Sharon Oliver, were with Parks when she died, Steele said.

Steele said she, federal Appeals Court Damon Keith and former Detroit Judge Adam Shakoor would make the funeral arrangements with the family. She said they would release a joint statement today.

The Swanson Funeral Home in Detroit is handling the arrangements

Parks' arrest for refusing to relinquish her seat infused 50,000 black people in Montgomery with the will to walk rather than risk daily humiliation on the city's buses. At that time, Jim Crow laws required separation of the races in restaurants, on buses and in other public places.

The gentle giant, whose quietness belied her toughness, became the catalyst for a movement that broke the back of legalized segregation in the United States, gave rise to the astounding leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and inspired fighters for freedom and justice throughout the world.

Keith called Parks' death "a tremendous, tremendous loss for the world.

"We knew she was in poor health. We wanted to be optimistic, but we knew the day was not far."

Her spirit lives in hundreds of thousands of people inspired by her unwavering commitment to work for a better world -- a commitment that continued even after age and failing health slowed her in the 1990s. Former South African President Nelson Mandela said he was inspired by her courage during the years he was imprisoned before he took office.

"We rejoice in her legacy, which will never die," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a statement Monday night. "In many ways, history is marked as before, and after, Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down. Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors to our long journey to freedom ... She wove glory with grace."

Parks' health had been declining since the late 1990s. She had stopped giving interviews and rarely appeared in public. When she did, she only smiled or spoke short, barely audible responses.

Carolyn Green, a cousin who helped care for Parks, said the family was devastated.

"Auntie Rosie meant the world to us," said Green, who spent much of the day Monday with Parks. "I'm happy she went peacefully."

In one of her last lengthy interviews, with the Detroit Free Press in 1995, she spoke of what she would like people to say about her after she passed away.

"I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings," she said during an interview from the pastor's study of St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small congregation she joined upon moving to Detroit in 1957.

Parks has said one of her biggest regrets is that numerous news stories reported that she refused to give up her seat because she was tired after a day of work. She was not. She was tired of the mistreatment of black people.

"I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day," she said in her autobiography. "I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old the. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

While it's known worldwide that her refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, it's less well known that Parks had a long history of trying to make life better for black people.

It was a desire embedded in her from childhood by her grandfather -- her mother's father with whom she lived when she was growing up. He taught his children and grandchildren not to put up with mistreatment. "It was passed down almost in our genes," Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "My Story."

Of her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, she wrote: "I remember that sometimes he would call white men by their first names, or their whole names, and not say, 'Mister.' How he survived doing all those kinds of things, and being so outspoken, talking that big talk, I don't know, unless it was because he was so white and so close to being one of them."

Her grandfather's father was a white plantation owner; his mother a slave housekeeper and seamstress. In recent years, Parks has relied heavily on a wheelchair and, according to court documents, suffered from dementia.

The dementia was revealed as a result of two lawsuits filed on her behalf against the record company for the hip-hop duo Outkast. The 1999 lawsuit claims the record label BMG Entertainment violated her publicity and trademark rights for the 1998 song "Rosa Parks," by using her name without her permission for commercial purposes.

But some of her family members claim Parks was incapable of filing such a suit of her own accord. They say it was an attempt by one of her attorneys, Gregory Reed and her longtime friend, Elaine Steele, to get money.

Meanwhile, in October of this year a federal judge appointed former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer as her guardian ad litem--a temporary, court-appointed attorney to assure her interests in the lawsuits are fairly represented.