Rosa Parks Lyrics

Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died today. She was 92.

American heroin (sic) Rosa Lee Parks has passed of natural causes at the age of 92. The internationally lauded African-American seamstress refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955′s Jim Crow dominated Montgomery, Alabama and, in doing so, helped ignite the modern civil rights movement. Parks was repeatedly in the news in the past few years as a part of a lawsuit against Atlanta hip-hop duo Outkast for their use of her name in the radio hit “Rosa Parks.”

Ah ha, hush that fuss
Everybody move to the back of the bus
Do you wanna bump and slump with us
We the type of people make the club get crunk

According to an article in the Byran-College Station Eagle:

Parks lost a 1999 lawsuit that sought to prevent the hip-hop duo OutKast from using her name as the title of a Grammy-nominated song. In 2000, she threatened legal action against an Oklahoma man who planned to auction Internet domain name rights to www.rosaparks.com.

After losing the OutKast lawsuit, attorney Gregory Reed, who represented Parks, said his client “has once again suffered the pains of exploitation.” A later suit against OutKast’s record company was settled out of court.

Political activist Dr. C. DeLores Tucker, the spirited civil rights pioneer who made headlines in the early nineties as gangsta rap’s most vocal opponent, also died this month of undisclosed causes in Norristown, Pa. She was 78.

Tucker made civil rights strides during the sixties and seventies, becoming the first black woman to be named vice chair of the state Democratic Party and the first woman vice president of the Pennsylvania NAACP. In 1965 she was the woman to the immediate right of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as they led a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama…

In 1993, she incurred the wrath of free speech enthusiasts when she began a public protest of gangsta rap lyrics. She even picketed the NAACP in 1994 – despite being a member of the board of trustees – when it nominated Tupac Shakur for one of its Image Awards.

In 1999, a federal judge threw out the suit Tucker filed against the estate of the late Shakur involving the rhyming of her last name with an obscenity in his 1996 album “All Eyez on Me.” She was also unsuccessful in suits against Time, Newsweek and other publications for their apparent misinterpretation of a lawyer’s comment to reporters about her lawsuit seeking damages for emotional distress because of a “loss of consortium.”

The legal definition of consortium includes a spouse’s loss of “society, guidance, companionship and sexual relations,” but it was the sexual aspect that magazines and a number of newspapers cited. Tucker and her attorneys denied that the suit had anything to do with damage to her sex life. The suit was thrown out by U.S. District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter in 1999.

There is no civil liberty without freedom of speech.