Rosa Parks A Symbol Again - Of Victims -- Attack On Icon Spotlights Black On Black Crime

DETROIT - In this tired, old city, which seems to be struggling against defeat, there is a corner near downtown where Rosa Parks Boulevard intersects Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

The two names - of the quiet, dignified African-American woman and of the golden-throated, soaring-visioned preacher who together pricked a nation's conscience - are indelibly etched on the canvas depicting black Americans' epic struggle for fairness.

Their lives intersected in 1955 when she sat down and took a stand, and he was there to harness a people's electric anger. Their paths intersected, and black folk in Montgomery, Ala., took to the streets and did not look back until America acknowledged their cause.

Parks became a symbol for African Americans - of their hopes, of their dreams, of their long-frustrated ambitions.

At the end of last month, Parks became a symbol of a different sort.

She was beaten and robbed by a crack addict who had busted his way into her Detroit home.

Parks, who said she was never struck by the sometimes-vicious whites during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, cried out as the man beat her. But, "nobody could hear me but him."

Parks again was a symbol - this time of how deeply African Americans had become mired in the morass of crime, drugs and economic hardship.

The attack on Parks came just before an 11-year-old was executed by fellow Chicago gang members after one of his stray bullets killed a young girl. And it was just after the opening stages of the trial for two men accused of killing basketball great Michael Jordan's father.

In all instances, black victims fell at the hands of black assailants.

Together, the cases seemed to send a particularly savage message: Neither the young, nor the old, nor those touched by fame are safe.

Even your icons, these cases seemed to shout, are at peril.

The incident involving Rosa Parks seemed to strike at the very heart of African-American experience - the mother of the civil-rights movement a victim of violence in her own home.

To best understand why this case struck such a chord, it helps to imagine a time line that has its beginnings four decades ago, when a black consciousness was emerging in the second half of this century.

The line of people that starts with Rosa Parks is long, bisected by black accomplishment: King, those who soldiered in the civil-rights movement, Thurgood Marshall. Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns, Clarence Thomas, and back to Rosa Parks.

In terms of geography, go back to Dexter Avenue in Montgomery, where the Route D city bus passes along the street in front of what used to be the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was here that Martin Luther King Jr. used to preach, and where the bus boycott was organized and sustained.

On a recent, overcast afternoon, there are but five passengers on the Route D. Four elderly African-American women sit up front; a young white man wearing earphones sits at the back.

Two African-American women, Laura Connor and Sharon Vason, are sitting on a concrete bench in front of a clothing store on Dexter Avenue. Connor, 73, participated in the boycott and remembers particularly how tired she got walking to work during the first days of the protest.

Of the attack on Parks, Connor said she didn't know what to make of the vicious cycle of crime that had turned so many soft-shoed veterans of that struggle into nervous prisoners in their own homes.

"It's not just up North," Connor says. "It's getting that bad here, too. People aren't paying any attention to kids now. There're so many who don't know where their kids are, and what they are doing."

Vason, 31, who has three children, says "it goes back to family.

It goes back to home. It goes back to church. It goes back to bringing them up in the command of the Lord."

Now, jump back to Detroit, that intersection of streets named for the preacher and the woman who refused to be pushed to the back of the bus.

On one corner there is a school; on another, a vacant lot backed by a falling-down house; on two others, churches.

There are no businesses there.

That telling absence is one of the legacies of the civil-rights movement. The movement earned African Americans the right to vote, the right for their children to sit next to white schoolchildren, the right to dine where they chose.

But the movement never addressed economic issues. It never stressed the importance of African-American ownership.

Therefore, blacks could eat in desegregated restaurants but couldn't pay the check when it came. They were largely unable to save their neighborhoods when whites moved out after they moved in.

As the neighborhoods fell further and further into despair, demons of poverty, drugs and violence began to possess the streets.

It is against this backdrop that an African-American man, a man reportedly seeking money for crack, broke into Parks' home, then beat and robbed the 81-year-old.

Parks' home is a modest, red-brick, two-story structure on a quiet, clean street of similar houses built in the early 1900s.

She is renting: There isn't much money in the icon business.

When Parks moved from Montgomery to Detroit in 1957 - partly because of harassing and threatening telephone calls, she worked as a seamstress, then later in a small clothing factory.

Then, from 1965 until 1988, she worked as a receptionist and office assistant for Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan.

On a recent, crystal clear afternoon, Parks stood under an azure sky and swept her front stoop.

By now, she has spent almost as much of her life as symbol as she did before becoming a symbol.

Yet, she is as unassuming and modest as a favorite aunt. She is frail, but her mind seems as sharp as ever. She ponders her answers carefully, peering intently at her questioner, and occasionally responding with a smile.

Does Parks ever feel the gains she helped African-American people acquire years ago have been squandered by the generations that came afterward, that are haunted by the demons of the streets?

Parks pauses and considers.

"It is very sad that so many young people are misguided," Parks says finally. "It can be very discouraging.

"There is just a great need for more people to be concerned about the young people. Parents, teachers, people in the justice system should be more concerned about their own as well as other people's children."

Toward that end, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development for young people in 1987.

Parks believes the black church - a traditional stronghold of the African-American community - must play a great role in reversing current behavioral trends.

"I think the church could encourage young people, and let them play an active role in church and Sunday school, just encourage young people's participation in all their activities," she says.

"It's a bad situation," she says. "But on the other hand, we have to be aware of the fact that we hear more about that sort of thing than we hear about the positive things our young people are doing.

"Things like staying in school. More of our young people are staying in school and finishing school now than ever before," she says. "But there's so much more emphasis and publicity on bad things than on the positive things."