Thursday, November 3, 2005

Larkins

In repose, Rosa Parks is on equal footing

Civil rights hero occupies the prime real estate at Woodlawn Cemetery's Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel.

By Laura Berman / The Detroit News

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Only a few years ago, she was living in near-poverty, struggling to pay her rent.

Now she lies in a tiny Tudor chapel, an elegant little building of stone and stained glass. Her name is engraved on two marble monuments at each heavy wooden door.

This is the Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel, arguably the most imposing resting place at Woodlawn Cemetery.

Beyond her -- you might reasonably say behind her -- lie Joseph L. Hudson, the department store founder, and Edsel Ford, the father of Henry II and William Clay Ford Sr. The Dodge Brothers -- Horace and John -- are guarded by sphinx-like lions. S.S. Kresge is here, as is media magnate John Lord Booth.

But it is Rosa Parks who occupies this prime real estate.

"Rosa Parks never believed in sitting in the back," says Mike Larkins, a Woodlawn Cemetery director for nine years, with a faint smile. He is standing outside the chapel, as golden leaves flutter to the ground.

At 10, he remembers, he walked down Woodward Avenue with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and 125,000 others in one of the nation's most famous civil rights marches. The striving of those days remained, always, in his heart, just as the street was a symbol.

He knew that Parks had owned a piece of property at the cemetery for 25 years.

It was in Section 29, where her husband, Raymond Parks, and mother, Leona McCauley, were buried, in lots 14 and 12, respectively. Lot 13 was supposed to be for Parks, on a peaceful swell of grass along the fence, toward the back.

Showing gratitude

Larkins had another idea. He and Freda Crawley, a human resources specialist who worked with him, drew up a formal proposal and submitted it to the family and the Rosa L. Parks Foundation.

"It was a way of showing my gratitude for what she had done," he told me Wednesday, waiting for the funeral procession.

The cemetery's owner, a Tulsa, Okla., oil man named Clayton Smart, backed the effort because, Smart said, "She was a great lady with courage."

When the foundation approved his plan to rename the chapel and entomb her there, Larkins wept.

"I cried," he said, "because really who am I? I'm nobody. But that's exactly what she did: She made all of the nobodies somebody."

At her grand funeral Wednesday, and over a week of celebrations and honors, Parks entered into the unofficial canon of American saints. She was enshrined as "the mother of the civil rights movement," repeatedly, and also as the rightful "mother of America" -- as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it.

But however great her accomplishment, there was a stark truth in that room of thousands at Greater Grace Temple. The few white faces largely belonged to the media and invited dignitaries -- the senators, the governor, a smattering of business figures.

On equal footing

In repose, she is, officially and for all to see, on equal footing, at least. Woodlawn Cemetery may be the most integrated, diverse neighborhood in the Detroit metropolitan area.

Opened in 1895, Woodlawn's grassy spaces play host to successive waves of Detroit greatness, from the automotive families to retailing giants Kern and Hudson. Later, there are the heroes of Motown -- the Berry Gordy family, Temptations singer Clovis Ruffin, the (Diana) Ross family -- and civil rights figures, like Aretha Franklin's father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin.

On Wednesday, a former president who was 9 when Parks refused to budge on that bus spoke about his reaction then: "I decided we didn't have to sit in the front anymore," Bill Clinton said.

Larkins wanted to help give Parks a final resting place worthy of her legacy. On Wednesday, the little chapel's grounds were freshly landscaped with yellow mums, and new marble benches gleamed in the sunlight.

"This is a very special day for me," he said.

Now Parks is up front, appropriately, in a place where she may still beckon by force of her example.

Laura Berman's column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Metro. Reach her at (248) 647-7221 or lberman@detnews.com.