Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Leaders recall activist as a hero

Contemporaries, dignitaries remember Rosa Parks as ushering in new era of fair treatment.

By Francis X. Donnelly and Joel Kurth / The Detroit News

Joe Marquette / Associated Press President Clinton smiles with Rosa Parks in the Oval Office, Sept. 14, 1996 after presenting her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who changed history before retiring to a simple life in Detroit in 1957, was lauded Monday night as a prominent symbol of the greatest social revolution in the United States.

A half century of silence failed to dim the raucous role the seamstress had played in American history by refusing to surrender her seat on a bus in the segregated south, said contemporaries and dignitaries in Metro Detroit and the nation.

They said the simple act of defiance in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., helped usher in a second half of the century markedly different from the first. She was the dividing line between then and now, between separate and equal, between good and evil.

"The civil rights movement in America is in a mourning era," Benjamin Hooks, the former executive director of the national NAACP, told The Detroit News from Memphis, Tenn.

"Rosa Parks was in no question one of the seminal persons in that movement."

Johnnie Mae Carr, who had known Parks since they attended the same elementary school in Montgomery, said her friend made tremendous sacrifices for the nascent civil rights movement. By taking on segregation, Parks lost her job as a tailor's assistant and received death threats.

But she was tough, Carr said. After attending a progressive high school and a labor organization camp, Parks avoided using colored-only water fountains, rest rooms and elevators. Sometimes she used those reserved for whites.

Her eye had been on the prize for a long time.

"They've picked on the wrong person now," Carr remembered thinking when she learned about Parks' arrest.

Others said that Parks made friends everywhere she went. They remembered her strength, sheer force of will and surprising sense of humor.

From politicians to civil rights leaders to old friends, she was hailed for an act that changed the world. Her legacy continued to burn long after the headlines faded.

Julian Bond, national NAACP executive chairman, said it's a cliché to describe Parks as the mother of the modern civil rights movement, but that is exactly what she was.

"She showed what kind of great effect one person could have," he said. "She put her body in the cogs of the segregation movement and it came to a halt."

After Parks was arrested for violating the segregation law, it sparked a boycott of Montgomery buses by a young minister named Martin Luther King. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such laws were illegal and subsequent boycotts eventually did away with Jim Crow laws entirely in the Deep South.

U.S. Appeals Judge Damon Keith, who was close friends with Parks for a quarter of a century, visited her six months ago. She didn't recognize him until he began to speak.

Keith said Parks could easily have become rich by exploiting her fame, but refused to do so.

"The world has lost one of the greatest human beings we have ever known," he said. "Her life exemplifies all that is good."

When Nelson Mandela came to Detroit, he skipped past all the dignitaries and made a beeline for Parks, said Keith.

"Rosa, Rosa, Rosa Parks," Keith recalled him saying. "She was the most important person in Detroit for this great leader to see."

The Rev. Keith Butler, pastor of the Word of Faith International Christian Center in Southfield and a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, said Parks visited the 21,000-member congregation twice in the late 1990s.

Though frail, she still had a commanding presence and won standing ovations, Butler remembered.

"She was a hero to us all," he said. "We all loved Rosa Parks."

He said the courage she had displayed was astounding. At the time, blacks had little protection against the police or anyone else.

U.S. Rep. John Conyers said in a statement that Parks was a true giant of the civil rights movement.

"There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation, and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals," he said.

Hooks, the former national leader of the NAACP, said he remembered meeting Parks repeatedly while he was a pastor at Greater New Mount Moriah church in Detroit. She was ordinary but powerful, he said.

He said he helped her with her civil rights foundation and was happy to call her his friend. A Memphis resident, Hooks came to Detroit twice a month to preach from 1964 to 1994.

"There had been a lot of people arrested in Montgomery for not riding the Jim Crow way," he said. "Only in the province of God do we understand why Rosa Parks' arrest sparked a movement in Alabama, the United States and the rest of the world."

Detroit News Staff Writers Orlandar Brand-Williams and David Shepardson contributed to this report. You can reach Francis X. Donnelly at (313) 223-4186 or fdonnelly@detnews.com.