There may be no two words in the English language that form a more perfect understanding of America's civil rights struggle than Rosa Parks. It is unusual, but no mistake, that those three famous syllables have gone coastal.
Michigan has an annual Rosa Parks Day. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference presents an Annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award. Streets, parks and libraries are named in her honor. Schools, facilities for troubled youth and even a racehorse carry her name as well.
The Rosa Parks title, it seems, is as ubiquitous as it is an expression of profound admiration for a Montgomery seamstress who chose to be arrested in December 1955 rather than give up her bus seat to a white passenger in violation of Jim Crow laws.
"It's hero worship but it's a particular kind of hero worship," said Cleveland Evans, the man at the top of America's name game. An expert in onomastics -- the study of names -- he is amazed that the Rosa Parks nomenclature has spread so widely.
"I would assume that there's sort of both a social and political thing that's going on there," said Evans, a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska and president of the American Name Society.
"I would assume that very often those names are given in towns and cities specifically that have a large African American population as a way to particularly give a role model to black children, and because, I assume, African Americans who live in those communities very much want to have facilities that are named after people who are specific heroes to their community," Evans said.
"To name something after a living person," Evans said, "there's usually some emotion behind it" from the public.
That would be especially true for state and municipal facilities, he said, because a general rule of thumb is that "governments say someone has to be deceased before they do that. So I think she's probably unusual in that she has a lot of things named for her while she is still alive. That shows you, in a sense, how important of a figure she is."
It also is a good indicator that many more places, events and structures will be named for her posthumously, he said.
Chris DeMassa, president of Los Altos, Calif.-based NAME-IT, which helps businesses create product and corporate names that possess flair and impact, likes the Rosa Parks title.
"It's a short, concise, attractive, memorable name that works," DeMassa said.
"I don't think there's any magical powers" to the ring of the name or its alphabetical DNA that would make people want to use it for their building, product or service, he said. "It's just about who she is and what she did" that make it a powerful word symbol.
In Montgomery, where Rosa Parks was secretary of the NAACP chapter when her arrest sparked a 381-day bus boycott, giving rise to her distinction as the mother of the civil rights movement, there are a number of places that bear her name.
On Rosa L. Parks Avenue, there is the Rosa Parks Branch of the Montgomery Library, the city's 1.7-acre Rosa L. Parks Park, the Rosa Parks Quick Stop convenience store, Rosa Parks Place apartments and the Rosa L. Parks Avenue Church of God. There is a short street named Rosa Parks Place. And then there's the Troy University Montgomery Rosa Parks Library and Museum on Montgomery Street.
"When you give your address out to people and you say, 'I live on Rosa Parks Avenue,' they know you are somewhere where something happened," said John Oliver. He lives in the 1200 block of that avenue, a good stone's throw from Cleveland Court, the apartment complex where Parks lived.
"It's a lot of pride involved, having known her and growing up in the same neighborhood, and pride in the street being named for her and the sacrifices she made over her life," Oliver said.
"I had a chance to meet her on the 25th year of the boycott," he said. He recalled her as "a real gracious lady, soft-spoken but a real strong will. With all that she had gone through, she was never bitter. . . She just knew change had to be made for a better society."
His mother, Helen, has lived in the same house on Rosa L. Parks Avenue "at least 59 years" and is grateful the city renamed what was once Cleveland Avenue in honor of its iconic former resident.
"It was a good thing to name something in her honor, just to give her recognition for the changes she helped make in our city," she said. But she still speaks with a tone of disappointment that an earlier attempt by her husband, Luther, to honor Parks failed to gain acceptance.
"When my husband was on the (city) council he wanted to name Oak Street for Rosa Parks," Mrs. Oliver said. "He introduced that bill." But opposition surfaced among residents and it failed to pass.
The Rev. Kathy McFadden, who lives in the 1400 block of Rosa L. Parks Avenue, has mixed feelings about the name of the street on which she lives.
"In one way it makes me feel good to know we are remembering those who made a sacrifice, and they did it while she was alive, they didn't wait until she died," said McFadden, who is pastor of Old Ship AME Zion Church.
"But it saddens me that this is no longer the place it used to be, and I pray that we can return the neighborhood to what it once was and not dishonor it by crime or things that we do," she said.
Bringing honor to the Rosa Parks name while inspiring teen girls who run afoul of the law is how the Rosa Parks Center of Missouri's Division of Youth Services got its name.
The facility opened on the campus of William Woods University in Fulton, Mo., in January 2001 as the Northeast Girls Group Home.
"The girls did a project on Black History Month and one of the people they did a report on was Rosa Parks. The facility manager and the girls were inspired because she was a female and she made a difference," said Stacey Fowler, secretary of the facility. "They decided because of what she stood for and what she did that would be a very fitting name for our type of facility."
Mary Ann Beahon, William Woods' director of university relations, said the adjudicated girls work closely with interns in the university's social work department. The girls take classes in their own building, but may attend university athletic and cultural events and eat meals in the campus cafeteria.
The educational community seems to have a particular affinity for the power of the Rosa Parks title. From Miami, Fla., to Cambridge, Mass., and from Baltimore, Md., to Berkeley, Calif., everything from daycare centers to high schools bear her name. There's even the Rosa Parks Campus of the College of New Rochelle in New York City, where 686 mostly women students pay $7,290 per year in tuition to attend.
Laurice Jeanes, assistant superintendent of West Harvey-Dixmoor District 147, isn't sure why a school committee and the school board chose the name Rosa L. Parks Middle School, but she knows the facility in Dixmoor, Ill., was the first in the district not named for a president.
The school, in suburban Chicago, has a 95 percent African American student body, Jeanes said, and Parks attended its dedication in the late 1970s.
But if there is one area in which the Rosa Parks name stirs controversy, as the Olivers of Montgomery can attest, it seems to be in the renaming of streets and highways.
In Wooster, Ohio, a mostly white municipality of 25,000 residents, Lydia Thompson believes her hometown officials behaved badly in opposing a Rosa Parks designation for local streets.
"We were in a good ruffle for a while," said Thompson. She is the wife of a preacher and was part of a citizens committee that tried to name one street, then another, in honor of Parks. Both proposals were rejected after what she termed long delaying tactics by the City Council.
"We were called rabble rousers" by a professor at a local university who hailed from Parks' native Alabama, she said. "They fought it, yes they did."
"I wasn't happy," Thompson said of the reasoning given -- street names should be reserved for local residents, and renaming a street causes challenges for residents and businesses who must change addresses and stationery.
Eventually, the ruling body voted to name a short venue through a local park as Rosa Parks Way.
Parks came to Wooster at Thompson's invitation to speak at the local NAACP Freedom Fund dinner, which Thompson chaired at the time.
"I thought it would be really nice that we could do something in remembrance," said Thompson, who portrays Parks and other black women pioneers in a one-woman show that she puts on at local schools and colleges.
Former Councilwoman Barbara Hustwit suggested giving the unnamed road that runs through Christmas Run Park the appellation Rosa Parks Way. She spearheaded a volunteer fundraiser to erect a plaque noting Parks' contributions to the civil rights movement and her visit to Wooster.
The wooden sign that was put up survived a tornado that swirled through the park and downed hundreds of trees all around it in November 2003, Hustwit said.
There was a very different sort of road rage in Missouri when then Gov. Mel Carnahan signed into law a bill creating the Rosa Parks Highway in 2000.
The portion of Interstate 55 near downtown St. Louis had been the focus of a long-running legal battle with the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK won the bitterly contested right to join the state's Adopt-A-Highway cleanup program and post signs bearing its name as sponsor. That very same stretch of concrete was promptly named for the civil rights heroine, though state officials deny there was any connection between the two events.
"I appreciate the highway being named in my honor," Parks said at the time. "Too many have suffered at the hands of the KKK. I am unsure of their purpose but I hope some good will come of this."
Although the Internet offers a horn of plenty when doing a search for Rosa Parks, nobody seems to maintain an all-inclusive list.
"We really only track the things that people ask us to name in her honor," said Anita Peek, executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development in Detroit. "We've only got a few dozen things that we have approved, and that in no way compares to the many things that have been named for her."
Despite the ongoing legal battle over the use of her name by the rap group OutKast, Rosa Parks has appeared in the title of movies -- "The Rosa Parks Story", a made-for-TV flick starring Angela Bassett and Cicely Tyson, was filmed in Montgomery -- books, and musical works by the Neville Brothers and other artists.
Her name even graces a link in the Los Angeles metro rail system -- the Imperial/Wilmington Rosa Parks Station in Watts serves 25,000 people every weekday.
Perhaps the most unusual appellation, though, was for a thoroughbred racehorse owned by the world famous Leigh Family Stable in Great Britain and trained by the legendary Christophe Clement of France. The mare won one race and placed in three others in its career.
Edgar Prado, the Peruvian jockey who twice won legs of the Triple Crown at Belmont Park, rode Rosa Parks in the fifth race there on Oct. 23, 2003.
"Unfortunately, I don't remember that race," said Prado. "That was a long time ago. I just don't remember that horse."
But Prado, whose more than 4,000 wins include twice riding a horse to victory at the Belmont Stakes to thwart a Triple Crown bid -- ending Smarty Jones' run in 2004 and War Emblem's attempt in 2002 -- does know about Rosa Parks the civil rights activist.
"My 10-year-old son gave me the whole speech about her," Prado said, and they watched a cable channel documentary on her life. He was especially impressed by the length of the bus boycott and the resolve of those who organized it.
"That was a good thing, everybody sticking together" to win equal rights, he said. "Yes, I know about Rosa Parks."
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