Saturday, October 29, 2005

Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News Former Mayor of Atlanta, Ga., Andrew Young speaks during the Montgomery Improvement Association Memorial Service for Rosa Parks, attended by about 500 people.

In Alabama, Rosa Parks memorial is part reunion, part call-to-arms

By Joel Kurth / The Detroit News

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MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- The battle is old. Its combatants went gray years ago. But Rosa Parks' work remains.

That was the message from several speakers at a 128-year-old church during a Friday service that launched this city's weekend-long celebration -- and mourning -- of the shy but firm seamstress whose refusal to yield her seat on a segregated bus in 1955 helped launch the modern civil-rights movement.

"How blessed we are, how proud we are of the progress made since she made her stand at the bus, but it is a reminder of the unfinished business that remains," said Alabama Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley.

Some 500 people, including elected officials and many participants in the 381-day bus boycott that followed Parks' arrest, attended the memorial at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. Gripping the podium where Martin Luther King Jr. led the boycott, Johnnie Carr said "thank the Lord that Rosa was tired, tired, tired and strong, strong, strong."

"Let's go about the business of making the world better than it is," said Carr, 94, a lifetime friend of Parks and president of the Montgomery Improvement Association that organized the boycott. "Go back to wherever you came from and put it to action."

Parks died Monday at age 92 in Detroit. Her body is scheduled to repose Saturday at her old church, St. Paul AME in Montgomery, before it is flown Sunday to lie in state at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. She will return to Detroit for viewing at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History on Monday and Tuesday before services Wednesday.

The memorial was part reunion and part call-to-arms. Children's choirs sang. Preachers read Biblical verses, and the crowd interlocked hands to sing "We Shall Overcome." Alabama State Rep. Alvin Holmes reminded the sometimes raucous, sometimes somber crowd that numerous blacks suffered indignities from bus drivers before Parks became a "victim of the forces of history."

Andrew Young, former mayor of Atlanta and a King lieutenant, recalled Parks sitting in with a class while he was a visiting professor at Michigan State University about 25 years ago.

"She talked in simple, humble terms," he said. "To hear her tell it, it was almost an accident."

Young, a former United Nations ambassador, said Parks set in motion a tide of resistance to oppression. Nelson Mandela, those who took hammers to the Berlin Wall and Chinese children standing in front of tanks at Tiananmen Square are "all heirs to Rosa Parks and Montgomery."