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Mother of civil rights movement deserved better

October 26, 2005

BY MARY MITCHELL SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

They don't make leaders like Rosa Parks anymore.

Although she was considered among the greatest women in modern history, she was so humble that she never publicly demanded anything for herself:

Not a paid-for house like the kind superstar athletes buy their mothers to thank them for raising them to be superstars. Indeed, last year, Parks' landlord had to be shamed into letting her stay in her apartment rent-free after threatening to evict her for nonpayment of rent.

Parks didn't demand a luxury hotel suite when she visited cities to teach young people; or front-row tickets to sporting events, stretch limos, first-class plane tickets or tables at five-star restaurants.

Parks didn't ask for anything other than that we share "peace and harmony and love."

When she refused to give her seat up to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Ala., 50 years ago, she changed the course of history.

Because she wasn't the neck-rolling, get-in-your-face kind, her defiance was even more remarkable.

She was a petite, 42-year-old seamstress who lived with her husband and mother and worked as a secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And if you think you have reason to be afraid of rogue police today, you can imagine what was going through Parks' mind when white police officers showed up to arrest her.

Parks could have been beaten. Worse yet, her husband could have been dragged from their home and lynched, and her mother could have been assaulted on a dark road by a posse of angry white men wearing hoods.

She didn't get her due

For a half-century, Parks was a living, breathing, walking piece of American history. Although a bust of her sits at the Smithsonian Institution, for all those years she was an icon shining with the warmth of real life. A marvel.

Yet, we've wept more for celebrities gone-astray than we have over the indignities Parks suffered in the twilight of her life. Because we take the sacrifices of the ordinary person for granted, Rosa Parks -- the woman we call the "mother of the civil rights movement," didn't get her due.

Think about it. Would we leave our mothers defenseless against the criminals we know are waiting to hit her in the head and take her money?

But in 1994, when she was 81, Parks was assaulted in her Detroit home by a man who knocked the hinges off her back door. He fled with $50. The man charged with the crime was 28, and he was charged with robbing two other elderly women in the neighborhood. If there was ever a man who deserved a taste of vigilante justice, it was he.

Two years later, President Bill Clinton awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I've often thought she got that medal as much for sparking a movement as surviving living in a rental apartment in Detroit for nearly 40 years.

Hero had to worry about bills

Didn't the mother of the civil rights movement deserve a home of her own with an alarm system or bodyguard? There were certainly enough wealthy black people in America by then to have provided Parks with the the same quality of life most middle-class black Americans enjoy.

When I met her in 1996, she was 83 years old and was reduced to hustling her memoir to schoolchildren who could barely afford paper and pens, let alone a $17 book. At the time, she was trying to fund the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which she founded in 1987. But she was surrounded by organizers who were so inept, they couldn't find sponsors to underwrite her hotel accommodations.

Think about that, too.

Corporate sponsors line up to underwrite every little conference or party that local civil rights groups hold in Chicago, but the mother of the civil rights movement had to worry about who was going to foot her hotel bill.

Unfortunately, things went downhill from there.

In the end, the mother of the civil rights movement was being ridiculed by cocky rappers OutKast, who defended their right to use her name in lyrics without paying her compensation. Although storied attorney Johnnie Cochran argued before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that Rosa Parks is an icon in this country and deserved better, and told the court that she objected to the use of her name without permission and to the racial slurs in the song, it didn't matter. At that time, Parks was 88 and apparently suffering from dementia.

She finally reached a settlement with OutKast last April when Sony BMG agreed to produce a tribute CD featuring the duo to honor the 50th anniversary of her arrest. Buying that CD would be the bigger insult.

But it was the NAACP -- the organization where all of this started -- that let Parks down the most. Ironically, it chose Cedric the Entertainer to host its Image Awards in 2003, despite the controversy over his jokes about her in the popular film "Barbershop."

Parks stayed home.

They don't make leaders like Rosa Parks anymore.

That's the main reason we are in the mess that we are in.
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RIP Rosa Parks. We should have done better by her.:(