In Detroit, Case of Rosa Parks Against Record Firms Wages On

Lawyers for Ailing Activist Press Suit Over OutKast Song Title

Activist Rosa Parks in 1956 is fingerprinted by officer D.H. Lackey in Montgomery, Ala. for violating segregation laws. (Gene Herrick -- AP)

DETROIT -- When lawyer Gregory Reed filed the first lawsuit, he referred to his client as "Rosa Parks (aka Mother of Civil Rights Movement)." Targeting the hip-hop group OutKast and its backers, he asked for an injunction and upwards of $5 million.

Last year, after federal courts had dismissed and reinstated the claim, Reed filed a new petition. He asked for $5 billion.

"You know what that does? It gets your attention," Reed explained. "You can't put a price on a name. You really can't put a price on a legacy."

Reed got people's attention, not all of it favorable. His lawsuit over OutKast's use of her name set the stage for a messy fight over Parks, 50 years after she famously refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus.

Ailing and unable to understand what is happening around her, Parks will turn 92 on Friday as a growing scrum of lawyers, friends and relatives battles over the meaning of a song.

The complications reach beyond the courthouse into questions about Parks's care. A federal judge, worried that Parks's own interests were becoming lost in the squabbling, drafted former Detroit mayor Dennis Archer to be her guardian.

Archer, once a Michigan Supreme Court justice and past president of the American Bar Association, said in an interview that he is "just trying to bring the temperature down." He wants to settle the case, "before everyone's gotten full body armor on and gotten out their long rifles and bayonets."

But he does believe in the lawsuit. He believes a wrong has been done to Parks and that someone in the music business should pay. "She is a symbol," Archer said, "of all that is good about America."

The trouble started when OutKast titled a song "Rosa Parks." Although the lyrics never mention her, they contain sexual references and vulgarity that disturbed Parks, once a seamstress and NAACP activist in segregated Montgomery whose arrest led to a tide-turning bus boycott.

The refrain is, "Ah ha, hush that fuss. Everybody move to the back of the bus." Group members Big Boi (Antwan Patton) and Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin) say it refers to the way OutKast intends to beat its rivals and rule its corner of the music kingdom.

By using her name without her permission, Parks's many lawyers contend, the producers and marketers broke federal rules designed to prevent people from profiting through misrepresentation. OutKast has been dropped from the lawsuit, which now mainly targets LaFace Records, Arista Records and BMG Entertainment, a division of music conglomerate Bertelsmann AG.

Reed, who wrote a book with Parks during better times -- "It outsold the Bible for 30 days," he likes to point out -- initiated the case. Calling her "a saint among angels," he said he tried to persuade the record company to change the song's title but got nowhere.

"We just wanted the name off," Reed said. "The music would've sold."

Over time, the complaint became a federal case, and the case morphed into a cause.