Indictment In Landmark Civil Rights Slay
(AP) A 73-year-old retired state trooper was indicted Wednesday in the 1965 shooting death of a black man, a killing that set in motion the historic civil rights protests in Selma and led to passage of the Voting Rights Act.
District Attorney Michael Jackson said a grand jury returned an indictment in the case. He would not identify the person charged or specify the offense until the indictment is served, which could take a few days. But a lawyer for former Trooper James Bonard Fowler said he had been informed that the retired lawman had been charged.
It took the grand jury only two hours to return the indictment in the slaying of 26-year-old Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was shot by Fowler during a civil rights protest that turned into a club-swinging melee.
The case was little-known as a civil rights-era cold case, but it has had major historical consequences.
Fowler contended he fired in self-defense after Jackson grabbed his gun from its holster. Calls to his home were not immediately returned Wednesday.
"I think somebody is trying to rewrite history, and I don't think it's fair to this trooper," said Fowler's attorney, George Beck. Beck said he was not told what Fowler had been charged with, but he said the district attorney had been talking about a murder charge, "so I assume that's what he got."
The indictment is the latest in a series of civil rights-era cases across the South that have been resurrected for prosecution after lying dormant for decades. In recent years, prosecutors have won convictions in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls and in the 1964 killings of three civil rights volunteers near Philadelphia, Miss.
In light of those cases, people in Alabama began to call for a new examination of Jackson's death. Michael Jackson, who was elected in 2004 as the first black district attorney in the Selma and Marion district and is no relation to Jimmie Lee Jackson, said he acted on these calls.
Jimmie Lee Jackson's daughter, Cordelia Heard Billingsley of Marion, who was 4 at the time of the killing, said: "We'll finally know what happened. My grandchildren have asked me questions, and I couldn't give them answers."
She said if not for the district attorney's election, "it would still have been swept under the rug."
Some of those who were in Marion on the night of the shooting are dead, as are two FBI agents who originally investigated Jackson's death. News reporters were also beaten and cameras destroyed during the melee, with no pictures left of what happened. The district attorney, however, said he had "strong witnesses."
Willie Martin, 74, who was at the 1965 rally that ended in violence and appeared before the grand jury, said he was glad to see action taken after 42 years. "They kept it smothered down. We didn't have nobody to represent us back then," he said.
Fowler was among a contingent of law officers sent to Marion on the night of Feb. 18, 1965. According to witnesses, about 500 people were marching from a church toward the city jail to protest the jailing of a civil rights worker when the street lights went out. Troopers contended the crowd refused orders to disperse. Soon law officers began swinging billy clubs, with marchers fleeing.
A group of protesters ran into Mack's Cafe, pursued by troopers. The cafe operator said 82-year-old Cager Lee was clubbed to the floor along with his daughter, Viola Jackson, whose son, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was shot trying to help them. He died two days later.
The shooting galvanized civil rights activists who had not been getting any national media attention in their efforts to register blacks to vote in Selma, said Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of "Parting the Waters" and other books about the civil rights movement.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived to preach Jackson's funeral, and in reaction to the killing, black civil rights demonstrators set out on March 7, 1965, on a march from Selma to Montgomery. They were routed by club-swinging officers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, an attack known as "Bloody Sunday."
National news coverage of the attack, including images of terrified marchers being beaten amid clouds of tear gas, made Selma the center of the civil rights movement. King, who was not present on Bloody Sunday, arrived to lead a weeklong Selma-to-Montgomery march later in the month.
Those events prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which transformed the political makeup of the South by ending various segregationist practices that prevented blacks from voting.
The retired trooper was not asked to testify before the grand jury. All of the witnesses who appeared before the panel Wednesday are black, and none witnessed the shooting. But Vera Jenkins Booker, the night supervising nurse at the Selma hospital where Jackson died, said the patient told her what happened.
"He said, 'I was trying to help my grandfather and my mother and the state trooper shot me.' He didn't give any name," Booker told reporters after her grand jury appearance.
MLK streets traverse nation's past, future
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the streets, avenues, boulevards and highways that bear his name remain crossroads of the nation's past and future.
In Atlanta, not far from where King grew up and preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive winds through the heart of the city. For 10 miles, the road dedicated in King's name in 1976 stretches past homes, schools, restaurants, liquor stores, strip malls, churches, barbershops, a roller-skating rink, boarded-up government flats and a gated apartment community, all the way to the city's downtown and its golden-domed Georgia Capitol building.
Pauline Moore, 84, moved with her family in 1940 into the first house built on the south side of what was then called Hunter Street. The family built a second and then a third house and raised chickens, hogs and other animals out back.
Blacks lived on one side of the nearby railroad tracks, whites on the other, said Moore, who still owns two of the houses.
Moore described a close-knit black community in the 1940s that sustained itself economically and socially. The area's blacks had their own churches, theater, mortuary, USO club, nightclubs and more, she said.
"During that time there were just certain places you could go, certain places you could live, and it was just different," she said.
"But after Martin Luther King broke down the barrier, everything changed."
Around the nation
At least 777 streets are named for King in the United States, each with its own history and character, said Matthew Mitchelson, a University of Georgia geographer who has researched roads named for the late civil rights leader.
They range from MLK Circle in Tupelo, Mississippi, at one-tenth of a mile, to MLK Boulevard in Tampa, Florida, at 14 miles.
Eighty-five percent of them are in the South, where King did most of his work and where African-American populations are more concentrated.
"The dominant stereotype is that these are crime-ridden, low-income areas that are just full of blight," said Mitchelson.
But the stereotype doesn't hold up, according to his study in the March 2007 issue of Social Science Quarterly.
"In terms of employment, Martin Luther King streets are actually much more vibrant than streets in general," providing addresses for more jobs on average than even Main streets, Mitchelson said in an interview.
A main reason for this difference is the prevalence of schools and government offices on MLK streets. "Statistically, it's off the charts," he said.
Although Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is a clear dividing line between black and nonblack populations in El Paso, Texas, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Cincinnati, Ohio, connects six neighborhoods that are by turns majority white, majority black, or nearly equally populated, according to the Web site Cincinnatihome.org.
Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Seattle, Washington, winds through miles of diverse populations and hosts a growing number of businesses, more than 30 percent of them owned by Asian-Americans, according to The Seattle Times.
Exchanging legacies
In Atlanta, the street's residential population is overwhelmingly black, census figures show. Before the King name in 1976, segments of the street had been called Gordon Road, for a Confederate general; Hunter Street, for one of the largest slave owners in the area; and Mozely Drive, for a businessman who donated land for a park that he insisted be made off-limits to blacks, said Derek Alderman, a cultural geographer at East Carolina University in North Carolina.
"Their names were replaced with King's, signaling a symbolic act" of exchanging one legacy for the other, Alderman said.
And while some of those streets reinforce the stereotypes, others are debunking them.
"People are making a significant effort to redevelop these streets that bear King's name," he said.
Just east of longtime resident Moore's house and past a block dotted with historical markers celebrating black business achievements of Moore's era and civil rights achievements of King's day, stands a Tyvek-wrapped frame of a complex of condominiums and town homes. The development creates mixed emotions in the neighborhood.
"A lot of people who live here aren't really going to be able to afford to live in those," said Altisha Lewis, 19, a student at Clark Atlanta University, one of five historically black colleges, including King alma mater Morehouse College, in the neighborhood.
Lewis said she fears the upscale development will lead to the razing of family homes and student housing and the closing of small, black-owned businesses.
Developer Steven Brock, known for building in parts of Atlanta where others fail or won't try, said he's working with the Atlanta Housing Authority and no one was displaced by the project. He's building on formerly abandoned property, he said.
"It's a great project, it's a great part of the city," he said. "It is socially challenged, but it's a project that's enhancing the quality of life for people in the area."
Tracy Gates, owner of the 60-year-old Busy Bee Café across the street from the site, welcomes the construction.
"I think development is good in any area of the inner city that is blighted, because if they didn't come, people wouldn't come to this area," she said.
"I think it's a great opportunity for the area ... because it changes the whole landscape," she said.
Societies as well as streets are bound to evolve, Pauline Moore said with a shrug.
"Time brings about a change."
MLK's message remembered at memorial groundbreaking
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Presidents, civil rights icons, celebrities and ordinary citizens gathered Monday on the National Mall, where construction is getting under way for a monument honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The monument will be built on a four-acre site near the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech during the March on Washington for civil rights in August 1963.
President Bush said that he was proud to dedicate the memorial to "the lasting memory of a great man."
"Dr. King showed us that a life of conscience and purpose can lift up many souls, and on this ground a monument will rise that preserves his legacy for the ages," Bush said.
"Honoring Dr. King's legacy requires more than building a monument. It requires the ongoing commitment of every American. So we will continue to work for the day when the dignity and humanity of every person is respected and the American promise is denied to no one."
Bush said it was fitting to place the King Memorial between the monuments for Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.
"By its presence in this place, it will unite the men who declared the promise of America and defended the promise of America with the man who redeemed the promise of America," Bush said.
"The monument, however beautiful it turns out to be, will be but a physical manifestation of the monument constructed in the minds and hearts of millions of Americans, who are more just, more decent, more successful, more perfect because he lived," Clinton said. (Watch civil rights icons talk about MLK and the memorial -- 2:10)
Clinton also stressed the importance of King's nonviolent message in today's society.
"When the real battlefield is the human heart, civil disobedience works better than suicide bombings. Fighting your opponent with respect and reason works better than aspersion and attack."
Members of the King family attended the ceremony along with current and former members of Congress, writer Maya Angelou, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Construction of the $100 million monument is scheduled to be completed in 2008, 40 years after King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
Backers have raised more than $65 million, according to The Associated Press. Most of the funding has come from corporate donors including Tommy Hilfiger and General Motors.
The monument's design was inspired by King's stirring sermons and will feature flowing water that will match the cadence of his speech.
According to the memorial's official Web site, visitors entering the memorial will pass through two stones described as the mountain of despair to reach a third, the stone of hope -- echoing King's 1963 speech.
The line "with this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope" will be carved into one side of the entry.
The other side will be inscribed with the words: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
Former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, one of King's lieutenants, said King's words were not important because he said them but because he lived them.
The King Memorial will be the first monument to a black American on the National Mall.
The Civil Rights Movement
Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white man sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and the start of the civil rights movement.
Mrs Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress when she made her stand in Alabama, on 1 December 1955.
She was arrested and fined $14.
Martin Luther King Jr
Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organised by the then little-known Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr (pictured here with his wife).
In March 1956 Dr King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott Montgomery buses, but a judge suspended his $500 fine, pending an appeal.
The protest led to the desegregation of the transport system.
Sit-ins and Freedom Rides
Activists also staged sit-ins at white-only lunch counters.
In 1961 volunteers began to take bus trips, or Freedom Rides, to test the implementation of new laws banning segregation in interstate bus terminals.
That May, Freedom Riders had breakfast at a lunch counter in the bus station in Montgomery - the first time the eating facilities at the station were integrated.
The Birmingham campaign
In 1963, a pivotal civil rights campaign was fought in Birmingham, Alabama, the most segregated city in the US.
"In Birmingham, white people had a lot of hate and little respect for black folk," one campaigner recalled.
"Segregation was the law and it was way out of line - a lot of folk were afraid," he told the BBC.
March on Washington
In August 1963, 250,000 people gathered in Washington DC to demand jobs and freedom for millions of black Americans.
It was a watershed for the movement.
Dr King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gave his "I have a dream" speech.
"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood," he said.
'First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement' Remembered
ATLANTA, Jan. 31 -- Coretta Scott King, who for three decades stood in the place of her slain husband, Martin Luther King Jr., as a bright flame and firm voice of racial justice, died Tuesday, her family announced.
King, 78, who lived in Atlanta, suffered a stroke in August but had made a brief public appearance on television Jan. 16, during a celebration of Martin Luther King Day.
Officials and family members said she died at a clinic in Mexico.
Her daughters, Bernice and Yolanda, were at the Santa Monica Health Institute, a holistic health center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, south of San Diego, with their mother, King's sister, Edythe Scott Bagley, told the Associated Press. Doctors at the clinic said King was battling advanced ovarian cancer when she arrived there on Thursday and died of respiratory failure, the AP reported.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
Universally known as the "first lady of the civil rights movement," King occupied a unique place in American society as the gentle and dignified heiress to the vast and fiery legacy left by her martyred husband.
Her face flashed across TV screens throughout Atlanta's sprawling airport Tuesday morning as the news of her death spread, and as it did, workers there stopped what they were doing to look up and remember.
Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who knew King and her husband well, was waiting to catch a flight back to Washington, moved from group to group, consoling them and remembering her with them.
"Have you heard?" he said, gesturing to the TV screens. "She's gone. Coretta's dead.
"She loved me and I loved her," Lewis, a member of Congress from Atlanta, who worked with both King and her husband in the civil rights movement for many years, told a reporter. "She was the glue that held the civil rights movement together."
Fareed Hakeem, 39, grew up on Auburn street, near Rev. King's Ebenezer Baptist Church. "She meant a great deal to the people of Atlanta," he said. "I just hope people will realize what her legacy meant for this generation."
Her special stature brought forth tributes from across the country.
"Laura and I are deeply saddened by the death of Coretta Scott King," President Bush said in a statement released by the White House. "Mrs. King was a remarkable and courageous woman, and a great civil rights leader. She carried on the legacy of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., including through her extraordinary work at the King Center. Mrs. King's lasting contributions to freedom and equality have made America a better and more compassionate nation."
"It's a bleak morning for me and for many people and yet it's a great morning because we have a chance to look at her and see what she did and who she was," poet Maya Angelou said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
"She was a sister-friend to me, we called each other 'children sisters.' She was a great wife, obviously, and a wonderful mother and a great woman, a great American. When I think of great Americans she's one of the people I think of," Angelou said.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), said, "Her loss is shocking not just to the civil rights movement but to progressives throughout the country and the world."
"We will miss her," he told the Associated Press. "But she certainly picked up the baton when it was dropped by her husband's assassination and continued to move forward in the civil rights arena."
"She was truly the first lady of the human rights movement. The only thing worse than losing her is if we never had her," the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York said in a statement released to wire services. "For those of us that were too young to get to know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. very well, we got to know Coretta Scott King as a compassionate, caring, yet firm matriarch of the movement for justice. She was kind and gentle with impeccable grace and dignity, yet firm and strong and immovable under issues that she and her husband committed their lives to."
As Martin Luther King was the father of the civil rights movement, said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), "she was the mother of that movement. They together were the force in this nation.
"In an area where our founding fathers failed -- founding fathers wrote slavery into the Constitution, we fought a civil war, but it wasn't really until we had Dr. King and Coretta Scott King in the '50s that awakened the conscience of the nation so the political leadership of the early '60s could begin what I call the march to progress, that of knocking down walls of discrimination on race, religion, ethnicity and gender, and disability. And we have benefited so much from their leadership and from their inspiration," Kennedy said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
"A final point I want to mention is that I've had the good opportunity to get to know the children over the years, and I have seen the time that they have spent with their mother," said Kennedy, whose two slain brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), worked closely with King. "Their mother was not only a powerful and charismatic figure and leader for our time, but she helped those children grow up to be individuals with a sense of dignity, a sense of pride in their heritage, and their strong commitment to do something for someone else. I admire her for that, as well."
In a statement, the King family said: "We appreciate the prayers and condolences from people across the country."
Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who is close to the family, told NBC's "Today" show that King's daughter Bernice went in to wake her up last night but was unable to do so.
"Her spirit will remain with us just as her husband's has," said Young.
Washington Honors Rosa Parks
President Bush and Laura Bush walk past the casket of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks who lies in honor at the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building, Sunday, Oct. 30, 2005 in Washington.
Civil rights pioneer Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was remembered Monday as a courageous woman whose defiance in the face of segregation helped inspire the architects of the civil rights movement and set an example for generations to follow.
An overflow crowd of mourners joined official Washington to pay tribute to the woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus helped galvanize the modern civil rights movement.
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who was born in Mississippi during segregation, said Parks' stand "changed the trajectory of my life and the lives of so many other people in the world."
"I would not be standing here today, nor standing where I stand every day, had she not chosen to sit down," Winfrey said (video). "I know that."
And despite Parks being known to the world for one seemingly simple action and a life as a seamstress, CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart reports that contrary to the popular myth that Parks stumbled into her role as martyr for a movement, the evidence suggests that the little woman in the oversized glasses had been biding her time for that fight on a Montgomery bus 50 long years ago (video>. Not only did Parks go to college, but she held an office in the NAACP. She trained at schools for civil rights activists.
Bishop Adam Jefferson Richardson of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church said, "we are here not because Rosa Parks died but because she lived graciously, effectively and purposefully, touching the lives of millions."
Richardson called Parks a "woman of quiet strength" who was "noble without pretense, regal in her simplicity, courageous without being bombastic."
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., said Parks' refusal to give up her seat "was the functional equivalent of a nonviolent shot heard round the world."
"She saw the inherent evil in segregation and she had the courage to fight it in its common place, a seat on a bus," said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.
Parks' life was celebrated at the church, where several hundred people were listening to tributes by Winfrey, NAACP chairman Julian Bond, and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., for whom Parks worked in his Detroit congressional office for more than two decades.
Conyers recalled that when former South African President Nelson Mandela visited Detroit in 1990, he led the crowd in a chant of Rosa Parks' name, "which made us realize that this is an international phenomenon that we celebrate. Rosa Parks is worldwide."
In attendance were Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and DNC chairman Howard Dean.
A painting of the elderly Parks rested above her mahogany coffin at the center of the altar, which was lined with flower arrangements. A large wooden crucifix loomed over the choir, which led the crowd in singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
"I wasn't surprised that she was arrested" for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man in December 1955, says Colvin, who had been arrested for the same offense nine months earlier and believes she was Parks' model. "She was a person who believed we could change things for ourselves. But to see her held up as this great symbol of the civil rights movement, that felt kind of strange. ... Sometimes I wanted to shout, 'Hey, that's Mrs. Parks. That's a real person, too.' "
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks, public symbol and private Every private Eperson, was remembered by those who knew her in both roles Tuesday, a day after she died in her Detroit apartment at age 92. (Related: Rosa Parks dies)
The public tributes recalled her simple act that touched off a 381-day boycott of Montgomery's buses, organized by a previously little-known preacher, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The boycott, which ended after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Montgomery's segregation policy in 1956, is marked by historians such as David Garrow as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.
Her eulogizers focused on how Parks, then a 42-year-old seamstress, lit the spark that became a blaze.
Feb. 4, 1913: Rosa McCauley is born in Tuskegee, Ala.
1932: She marries Raymond Parks, 29, a barber.
1943: Rosa Parks is elected secretary of the Montgomery, Ala., branch of the NAACP.
1954: In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , the U.S. Supreme Court rules that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. It paves the way for broad desegregation.
Dec. 1, 1955: In Montgomery, Parks refuses to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man, as required by local law. She is arrested.
Dec. 5: Parks is fined $14. More than 5,000 people pack Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery and pass a resolution backing a bus boycott.
Jan. 30, 1956: The Montgomery home of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is bombed. Two days later, groups backing Parks file a federal lawsuit challenging segregation on buses.
June 4: A panel of U.S. judges strikes down Montgomery's bus segregation laws.
Nov. 13: The Supreme Court rules segregation of city buses is unconstitutional. The boycott ends about a month later, after federal injunctions enforce the court's ruling.
January 1957: King helps establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It becomes a key organizer of the civil rights movement.
1957: Parks and her husband move to Detroit.
Aug. 28, 1963: Parks joins March on Washington, where King gives his "I Have a Dream" speech before about 250,000 at the Lincoln Memorial.
1965: Parks begins working for Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. She retires in 1988, after helping to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national holiday.
1977: Raymond Parks dies.
1979: Rosa Parks receives Spingarn Award, the NAACP's highest honor for civil rights.
1996: She receives highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Three years later, she receives Congressional Gold Medal.
Dec. 1, 2000: Rosa Parks Museum and Library opens at Troy State University-Montgomery.
Oct. 24, 2005: Parks dies at 92.
President Bush called her "one of the most inspiring women of the 20th century."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a black woman from Birmingham, Ala., was two weeks past her first birthday on the day Parks was arrested. At a news conference in Ottawa on Tuesday, Rice said Parks "inspired a whole generation of people to fight for freedom."
African-American political leaders noted the symbolism of Parks' act.
"In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks," civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said. "She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down."
Parks' act was simple, but its impact, others noted, was profound.
"Other than the Rev. Martin Luther King, no other person has had such a role in changing (the African-American) vision of our community and our country," Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said.
Parks' prominence endures, said historian John Hope Franklin, because the memory of her act speaks to the widest possible audience.
"Her determination (was) to stand up, not merely for herself, not merely for all women, not merely for African-Americans but for all Americans," said Franklin, historian emeritus at Duke University.
Friends and family members recalled a woman who, while never completely comfortable with her celebrity, was willing to use it as a teaching tool. "She was private in an old-fashioned way, but she was always willing to talk about the issues, especially to younger people," said Rhea McCauley, one of Parks' 13 nieces and nephews. Parks, a widow, had no children.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who employed Parks as a receptionist in his Detroit office from 1965 to 1988, said she "never sought the limelight."
"Everybody wanted to explain Rosa Parks and wanted to teach Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn't very interested in that," Conyers said. "She wanted them to understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to perfect today."
Reluctant celebrity
Sometimes, the attention could be unwelcome. May Doss, like Parks a member of St. Matthew AME Church in Detroit, remembers congregants making "a fuss" over an embarrassed Parks when Parks and other church deaconesses assisted at Sunday services wearing distinctive white dresses, gloves and pillbox hats.
Parks might have been uneasy with her subsequent celebrity, but she was prepared for her date with history. Born in Tuskegee, Ala., and reared in Pine Level, Ala., she took an interest in what would come to be known as civil rights at a young age. In her 1992 autobiography, My Story, Parks noted that a grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, had made a point of not addressing all white men as "Mister," as was the practice in his day.
Parks first tried to sit in the whites-only section of a Montgomery bus in 1943 but was shouted down by fellow black passengers, she told The Detroit News in a 1990 interview. Her second attempt came after she had studied at an integrated summer school.
After her arrest, the NAACP asked Parks to fight the segregation policy in court, and she readily agreed. But the lawsuit that ultimately undid the policy was filed by Colvin, her former student, and others.
Laid off from her sewing job and beset by harassing phone calls, Parks moved to Detroit in 1957 and, for the most part, faded into obscurity.
A co-worker, Elaine Steele, helped Parks found a not-for-profit institute that teaches life skills and the history of the American civil rights movement to young people. After retiring from Conyers' office, Parks devoted most of her time to that.
Parks gradually re-emerged as a public figure in the 1980s, lending her name to awards and scholarships. By the time she died, she had been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal and more than 40 honorary degrees. Streets, parks, libraries and schools across the USA were named for her.
Wherever she went, she was pressed to retell the story of her arrest. She always obliged, even while complaining to a Detroit News reporter in 1990, "My life did consist of more than being arrested on a bus."
Public viewings and funeral services tentatively are scheduled in Montgomery on Saturday and Sunday and in Detroit next Tuesday and Wednesday, said U.S. Appeals Court Judge Damon Keith, a longtime Parks friend. She will be buried in Detroit.
