Allen Eddie B. - Our Auntie Rosa: the family of Rosa Parks remembers her life and lessons

Painting by Asheber Macharia

Preface

PLEASED TO MEET YOU, MRS. PARKS

In a peculiar way, I felt that I knew her well.

We spoke only twice, and then Id imagine no more than twenty or thirty words between us from both events combined: the first when she awarded me a scholarship bearing her name and the second after a home invasion by a man who actually called that name aloud, asking, Arent you Rosa Parks? before he hit her in the face and robbed her.

Maybe it was just that same comfort Ive often experienced with women who fell into my grandmothers peer group. Ive noticed this, increasingly, since Mama Harriet, Harriet Crainborn, like Rosa McCauley, in Alabama, just months earlierdied in 1996.

Yet the truth was, despite the fact that a newspaper colleague of mine was her private photographer, and despite my years as a Wayne State University Rosa Parks Scholar in her adopted hometown of Detroit, I knew Mrs. Parks no more on the personal level than any of her distant admirers. I felt privileged, of course, to shake her hand at the scholarship ceremony and pose with her for a quick photo. A few years later, I found myself telephoning her assistant from my desk at the Ohio newspaper where I worked when I needed a quote or two for my story about the heinous attack Joseph Skipper committed against the then-eighty-one-year-old Mother Parks, as she was known to neighbors. After promising that Id be brief, since she was tired and recovering from the ordeal, I was connected with Mrs. Parks, who told me she was okay.

Things have worked out well, I remember her saying in our two-minute interview.

During our last encounter, she spoke no words at all. On that day in 2005, Id been asked to cover her funeral for the AOL Black Voices website. I heard President Bill Clinton tell the story of how, as liberal white kids in Arkansas, he and his friends decided they didnt have to ride in the front of the bus upon learning that Mrs. Parks had refused to stand and ride in the back. I watched as she was saluted in a manner befitting heads of state by a string of high-profile dignitaries, including Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and then-senator Barack Obama. It was a most moving day, which concluded as onlookers lined the streets awaiting her funeral procession to the burial ground. Calls of We love you, Rosa! were absent of the tone of disrespect most people who were raised like I was often associate with addressing elders by first name. What it really spoke to was the familiar kinship these folks, who probably knew her even less than I did, had developed with our citys best-known freedom fighter.