Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Judy Ondrey / Associated Press Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., help to open a civil rights conference in Atlanta in 1988. Parks' death offered Detroit residents a chance to reflect on how much has yet to change.

Parks made a difference, but changes are still needed

By Ron French / The Detroit News

Funeral services Tentative funeral arrangements for Parks include: • Public visitation Nov. 1 at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit from 6 a.m. until 12 a.m. • A funeral service Nov. 2 at Greater Grace Temple in Detroit Error processing SSI file Rosa Parks' legacy Rosa Parks established herself as a civil rights legend when, in 1955, she refused to give up her bus seat to a white rider. Her defiance sparked the flame of the modern civil rights movement. How did Rosa Parks make a difference in your life? Get results and comments Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

The woman who symbolized the civil rights movement lived the last 48 years of her life in a city that has come to symbolize what she fought against.

Blacks have made major strides toward equality in the half-century since the mild-mannered seamstress refused to give up her bus seat to a white rider. Yet from her high-rise apartment, Rosa Parks could look out on a city where African-Americans arguably live less equally to their white neighbors than in any metropolitan area in the nation.

Parks' adopted home of Detroit is today the most segregated metropolitan area in the nation. Blacks have more health problems, die younger and make less money than whites.

The death of Parks offered Detroiters a chance to reflect on how much has changed in 50 years, as well as how much is yet to change. The laws Parks fought against are relegated to history books. But for the generation carrying those history books, the battle isn't over blacks riding in the back of the bus, but whether blacks have enough money for bus fare.

There's a "tremendous irony" in the icon of the civil rights movement settling in Detroit, said Edith Clifton, community affairs director of Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in northwest Detroit.

"She left a place where the segregation was so obvious, a fact of life," Clifton said. "She came to this city in the north, where you'd think it wouldn't be an issue. We don't have the signs. We can ride the buses. But racism and segregation is still a potent force and fact of life."

While praising Parks' contribution as a catalyst for the civil rights movement, Metro Detroiters expressed frustration at the lack of progress in the region that took her under its wing.

"We're not happy with where we are," said Lyn Lewis, professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Detroit Mercy. "Fifty years after Rosa Parks, we still have some of the old problems and some new ones as well."

Detroit has the most segregated neighborhoods in the country. Even the region's middle-class blacks tend to cluster in a few predominantly black suburbs.

Three out of four blacks in the region live in Detroit, ranked by the U.S. Census as the poorest big city in the country. Detroit residents earn 55 cents for every dollar earned by those in the suburbs -- the second-highest discrepancy between city and suburbs in America. One out of three Detroit residents lives below the federal poverty line.

In Metro Detroit, twice as many whites have a bachelor's degree or higher than blacks. The median household income for whites is $55,000, compared to $32,000 for blacks. Infant mortality, cancer and heart disease rates are higher among blacks.

In an era when discrepancies between the races remain stubbornly in place, the program aimed at giving blacks a leg up, affirmative action, is under fire. A ballot initiative asking voters to ban minorities from receiving preferential treatment in Michigan is likely to be on the ballot in 2006.

"The progress we've made toward equality and integration is under attack in America and Michigan," said Luke Massie, national co-chairman of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a group fighting to uphold affirmative action. "It's been getting worse over the past few years in a whole set of ways. It's a classic pattern. People take things for granted ... and then there is a period of steps backward. What Rosa Parks stood for in her life, was standing up against racism and segregation, and now is the time to do that again."

"There are a lot of forces working against blacks, even 50 years later," said Kurt Metzger, research director for United Way for Southeastern Michigan. "Blacks are still at a disadvantage in this country."

Racial tensions are running high in Livonia, where some are protesting the construction of a Wal-Mart because of fears it will attract blacks to the community, which is the whitest city over 100,000 population in the country. There have been several instances of cross burnings on the lawns of African-Americans recently, and the divide between the city and its predominately white suburbs has surfaced as an issue in Detroit's mayoral race.

Race relations in Detroit "are just about static," said Raymond K. Sewell Jr., an administrative law judge who lives in Bloomfield Hills. "It's been this way for the past 20 years, (and) it's unfortunate."

Sewell, who was the first African-American deputy prosecutor in Macomb County, took part in a test years ago to determine if real estate agents were steering black home buyers away from white neighborhoods. The test found widespread racial steering.

The test was repeated last year, with almost identical results.

"There is still an undercurrent (of racial prejudice) in this community," said Sewell, 69. "There is a distance to go."

Rosa Parks was always more important as a symbol than as a leader, said Paul Lee, a local historian and president of Best Efforts Inc., a historical research service. Two black women were arrested for refusing to give up their seats to white bus riders in Montgomery before Parks. The NAACP chose Parks as their "test case" instead of the other women because of her unblemished record. Her status as the "mother of the civil rights movement" is due primarily to the work of a number of ministers and black community leaders.

"Had the tremendous organizational work not preceded her act, she would have been just another black person who'd been abused," Lee said. "It was not a sainted individual who changed history. It was a sainted individual who allowed herself to be used by an organized movement that changed history."

Metzger despairs about the state of blacks in Detroit and what it will take to make Parks' dreams of equality fully realized.

"She moved to a city that exemplifies all the disparities she was trying to erase," Metzger said. In her adopted home, "she became a symbol of the battles that are still to be fought."

"I don't know who the Rosa Parks are today," Metzger said.There are plenty of potential Rosa Parks, said UD-Mercy's Lewis, but not the collective will to force change.

Parks didn't end segregation in the south -- it was the thousands of blacks who, inspired by her example, boycotted the bus system in Montgomery for more than a year.

Today's racial disparities will continue until blacks are willing to sacrifice as a group in the same way their grandparents did, Lewis said.

"That collective consciousness needs to be restored before injustices can be addressed," Lewis said.

But Massie of BAMN said collective consciousness doesn't happen overnight -- it starts with individuals willing to make a stand as Rosa Parks did.

"There are people who need to wake society up to the inequalities in society," Massie said. "That's the legacy she represents."

Mary Winston is more optimistic. She once met Rosa Parks at a Farmer Jack in Detroit. "She was so little and so sweet," said Winston, 60, of Detroit. "I had her autograph my Bible." The combination of that book and that name seemed somehow right to Winston.

Recently, Winston rode the People Mover to Cobo Hall. On the train, she saw a black woman sitting on a bench next to a white woman. Nobody asked the black woman to move. In fact, the white woman had her arm around the shoulders of the black woman.

"I thought, 'Lord, this is the way we're meant to be.'"

The way Rosa Parks wanted us to be.

Detroit News Staff Writers Joel Kurth contributed to this report. You can reach Ron French at (313) 222-2175 or rfrench@detnews.com.