Later life

Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus a year after they were desegregated.
After her arrest, Parks became an icon of the civil rights movement and suffered hardship as a result. She lost her job at the department store and her husband quit his after his boss forbade him from talking about Rosa or the legal case. Mrs Parks traveled and spoke extensively to raise money for her legal fees. In August 1957, weary of phone death threats and fearing firebomb attacks on the homes of their supporters, she and her husband accepted the urging of family who feared for her safety and moved to Detroit, Michigan to live near her younger brother. In 1958 she moved to Hampton, Virginia, where she found a job as a hostess in an inn at Hampton Institute. However, there was not enough room for either her husband and mother to live with her and she moved back to Detroit and worked as a seamstress. She became a secretary and receptionist to U. S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) in 1965, a position she continued in until her retirement in 1988.

Last days

Rosa Parks resided in Detroit until she died at the age of 92 on October 24, 2005, at about 19:00 hours EDT, at her apartment in a nursing home on the east side. She was diagnosed with Progressive Dementia in 2004. She will lie in state October 29 and October 30 in Montgomery, Alabama. Her body will then return to Detroit to lie in state at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History on November 1. Parks is also expected to lie in repose at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., an honor no other American citizen has been granted. A viewing and her funeral will be held November 2 at the Greater Grace Temple and she will be buried between her husband and mother at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit. Parks had previously prepared and placed a headstone on the selected location stating “Rosa L. Parks, wife, 1913-”.

Lawsuits and controversy

In 1999 a lawsuit was filed on her behalf against the popular American hip hop duo OutKast and LaFace Records, claiming that the group had illegally used her name without her permission for their song “Rosa Parks”, the most successful radio single of their 1998 album Aquemini.
In October 2004, U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh appointed Dennis Archer, a former mayor of Detroit and Michigan Supreme Court justice, as guardian of legal matters for Parks after her family expressed concerns that her caretakers and her lawyers were pursuing the case based on their own financial interest.[4] “My auntie would never, ever go to this length to hurt some young artists trying to make it in the world,” Parks’ niece, Rhea McCauley, said in an Associated Press interview. “As a family, our fear is that during her last days Auntie Rosa will be surrounded by strangers trying to make money off of her name.”

OutKast was dismissed from the suit in August 2004. Parks’ attorneys and caretaker refiled and named BMG, Arista Records and LaFace Records as the defendants along with Barnes & Noble and Borders Group for selling the songs, asking for $5 billion in damages. The lawsuit was settled on April 15, 2005. In the settlement agreement, OutKast and their producers and record labels paid Parks an undisclosed cash settlement, agreed to work with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in creating educational programs on the life of Rosa Parks. The record labels and OutKast admitted to no wrongdoing. Whether Park’s legal fees were paid for from her settlement money or by the record companies was not disclosed.

A scene in the 2002 film Barbershop, where characters discuss earlier instances of African-Americans refusing to give up their bus seats, caused activists Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to launch a boycott against the film. The scene showed a barber arguing that many other African Americans before Parks had resisted giving up their seats; but because of her status as an NAACP secretary, she received undeserved fame.