History > 2006 > USA > Race relations (IV)

A familiar U.P.I. photo of Mrs. Parks on a bus, from 1956,

was used by Apple Computer on its Web site

NYT        October 8, 2006

Rosa Parks Won a Fight, but Left a Licensing Rift        NYT        8.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/business/yourmoney/08rosa.html

An Inward Look at Racial Tension

at Trinity College

December 18, 2006
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

HARTFORD, Conn. — James F. Jones Jr. had been president of Trinity College for two years before a black student pointed out to him that he always ate lunch on the side of the dining hall where white students gather.

Since that day last month, Mr. Jones, who is white, has made a point of taking a table on the other side, with the minority students.

He also bought the book “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” for his office, and recently handed out 45 copies to the college’s trustees and senior administrators as “required reading.”

“I didn’t even know I was eating on the white side,” Mr. Jones said.

Trinity officials, professors and students have been forced to reexamine their daily interactions with one another this semester after a series of racially polarizing events that have drawn widespread complaints from minorities over what they see as a climate of incivility and intolerance within their privileged campus of Gothic spires.

From classrooms to hip-hop concerts, the angry dialogue has led to some student protests and focused an unusual level of scrutiny on the college’s practices and policies.

Since October, two minority women have reported that racial slurs were scribbled on message boards outside their dorm rooms.

Another student, who is white, painted himself black for a Halloween fraternity party and then posed for pictures that turned up on a popular Web site, Facebook.

In addition, many of Trinity’s minority students said they had long felt discriminated against.

Some black students said they were regularly stopped at the campus library and asked to show identification while their white classmates just walked in, and at least one Hispanic professor complained to his colleagues of being mistaken for a janitor.

Minority students and their supporters have staged protests, including one in which students spread out in the dining hall to desegregate it for a night, and called upon college officials to improve social relations by taking steps such as spelling out a racial harassment policy in the student handbook, incorporating race issues into the curriculum, and providing more financial aid as a way to broaden the socioeconomic diversity of the student body.

“I feel more tension here than ever before,” said Ashlei Flemming, 19, a junior from West Palm Beach, Fla., adding that white students have avoided making eye contact and turned away from her because she is black. “There are times when I want to feel good about Trinity, and then I walk out and I’m reminded of the underlying disgust that we have here for each other.”

But other students like Chandler Barnard, who is white, said that they have not seen any discrimination against minorities on campus. “I kind of think it is blown out of proportion a little bit,” said Mr. Barnard, a 20-year-old junior who said his hometown, Lubbock, Tex., is much more conservative on such social issues. “I don’t see it as that big of a problem.”

The debate over race relations at Trinity comes as other colleges and universities are confronting similar situations. For instance, Johns Hopkins University officials suspended a fraternity after its “Halloween in the Hood” party invited students to wear “bling bling” and “hoochie hoops.” Similarly, a group of first-year law students at the University of Texas at Austin were reprimanded for participating in a “ghetto fabulous” costume party and posting the pictures from it online.

But the impact seems to be magnified at a small liberal arts college like Trinity, which has 2,165 undergraduates.

Founded in 1823 by Episcopalian leaders, Trinity has a long tradition of religious freedom and expression among its students. In recent decades, college officials said they have sought to promote racial diversity and tolerance as well.

Currently, one in five of Trinity’s students are minorities, but that is significantly lower than at other similarly sized liberal arts schools. For instance, minority students make up about 36 percent of the students at Swarthmore College, 31 percent at Amherst College, 28 percent at Williams College and 26 percent at Wesleyan University.

Yet Trinity does have one of the highest acceptance rates among liberal arts colleges for black students, who make up 5 percent of the student body, according to a survey by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In 2006, Trinity accepted 52.8 percent of black applicants, compared to 42.8 percent of all applicants. In comparison, Amherst accepted 48.3 percent of black applicants, Swarthmore accepted 37.4 percent, and Wesleyan accepted 34.7 percent. Those schools, which are generally more competitive academically, have had better luck getting African-Americans to enroll than Trinity.

Mr. Jones said that Trinity had also tried to improve diversity by increasing its financial aid at a time when other parts of the budget are being cut. Trinity, which has a $380 million endowment, plans to use about one-third of its current $300 million capital campaign to further expand that aid, he said. About 37 percent of Trinity students receive financial aid; the college’s tuition and room and board costs $42,410 annually.

“As an institution, we are committed to doing everything humanly possible for the diversity of the student body,” Mr. Jones said.

This is not the first time that Trinity has been divided by racial tensions. In 2003, the college canceled classes so that more than 1,500 students and faculty members could hold a “Dialogue Day” on race and diversity. It was prompted by complaints from black and Hispanic male students that they were being singled out for greater scrutiny by Hartford police officers.

After this semester’s racial divisions, college officials held a forum last month on “socially offensive and unacceptable behavior” at the campus theater that drew hundreds of students and faculty members. The college is also reviewing its harassment and bias policies, and forming a committee of trustees, faculty members and students to address social issues. The committee is expected to report its findings in May.

“These incidents are catalysts for change,” said Peter Blum, a trustee and 1972 graduate, who said he was shocked and disturbed by the racial events. “You have to do some soul searching as an institution and reinforce your commitment to getting it right.”

The harshest assessments of Trinity’s diversity efforts have come from its own students. Based on student surveys, Trinity has made the Princeton Review’s annual list of schools with “little race/class interaction” for the past eight years. Trinity topped the list in three of those years, and is currently ranked fourth. College officials have disputed the methodology of the surveys.

David Calder, 20, a junior from Columbia, Md., said that he had grown frustrated with what he saw as the college’s short-term fixes and its reluctance to undertake more drastic measures such as banning fraternities. “In our experiences at Trinity and in life, committees don’t do much,” said Mr. Calder, who is white. “They’re very good at smiling and patting themselves on the back, but at the end of the day, nothing gets done.”

Karla Spurlock-Evans, the dean of multicultural affairs, acknowledged that one of the college’s most ambitious diversity efforts — a two-year “Pride and Prejudice” initiative that was to follow “Dialogue Day”— never got under way because of administrative changes. (Trinity has had four presidents, and one acting president, since 2000).

But she argued that other programs have provided support to minority students, and fostered more tolerance and respect on campus. “I know students are frustrated because they’re only here four years and they want to see it while they’re here,” she said. “But I’ve been here a long time, and I know every effort counts.”

Christina Ramsay, 19, an African-American sophomore, conducted her own social experiment on race relations. Last spring, Ms. Ramsay crossed to the other side of the dining hall and sat down at a table normally occupied by white football players. She said that several of the players got up and moved, while others stared at her throughout dinner without saying a word to her. “I wanted to hide under the table,” she recalled. “By the end of it, I was just really upset.”

When asked about Ms. Ramsay’s experiment, several of the football players said last week that they had been confused to find her at the table, not because she was black but because she did not usually sit with them. They said that she had not tried to talk to them, either, and that they resented being used unknowingly as the subject of her experiment.

“It has nothing to do with race, it’s where we always sit,” said Jeff Carpenter, 22, a junior from Pottstown, Penn. “As football players, we get stereotyped all the time.”

    An Inward Look at Racial Tension at Trinity College, NYT, 18.12.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/nyregion/18trinity.html

Arizona cop had men rap away ticket

Updated 12/1/2006 9:35 PM ET
By Amanda Lee Myers, Associated Press
USA Today

TEMPE, Ariz. — City leaders have apologized after a program on Tempe's cable channel showed a white police officer telling two black men they could get out of a littering ticket by performing a rap.

Tempe Mayor Hugh Hallman and Police Chief Tom Ryff apologized for the show Thursday and suspended its future production after black community leaders voiced outrage and disappointment.

"I accept responsibility for the actions of my staff and apologize to any members of our community who have been offended," Ryff said during a news conference Friday.

The segment appeared on Tempe StreetBeat, a program produced by police in the Phoenix suburb that followed several officers on patrol. It shows Sgt. Chuck Schoville pulling over two men in August in a mall parking lot.

He first asks for a name and ID from the driver and then asks the two men if they know how much the fine is for littering.

The officer then tells the men that they can avoid getting a littering ticket "if the two of you just do a little rap about — what do you want to do a rap about? Littering? About the dangers of littering."

The two men agree, and each performs a short rap, laughing afterward. One says, "The dangers of littering, you will get a ticket. If you ain't wit' it, you better be experienced."

The second man raps, "Yo, I just got pulled over 'cause I threw my trash out the window when they rolled over. They got behind me and pulled me over."

Later, Schoville talks football with the men, one of whom agrees with his prediction that the Oakland Raiders will make it to the Super Bowl this year.

Schoville then says, "You know why you say I'm right? Because I got a gun and badge. I'm always right. That's the way it works, right?" The three laugh and the two men get in their car.

Leaders of chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Action Network expressed outrage and demanded that the city act.

The Rev. Jarrett Maupin of the National Action Network, who was at Friday's news conference, said he had accepted Hallman's and Ryff's apologies and intends to make sure the police department makes good on a proposal for an African American advisory board and increased diversity training.

"It's important for police officers to realize that black people do not speak hip hop," Maupin said. "We're not all rappers and thugs and gangbangers. We speak the English language and we're entitled to the same amount of respect."

Ryff said the department is investigating how the video got on the air, who watched it and who edited it. He wouldn't discuss whether there would be any punishment for those involved.

The chief said that he hadn't been able to contact Schoville, a 25-year veteran of the Tempe force, because the officer is on vacation. A message was left with the department seeking comment from the sergeant.

Because the men in the video were not cited, Tempe police had no record of their names.

    Arizona cop had men rap away ticket, UT, 1.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-01-ariz-ticket_x.htm

Panel Suggests Brown U. Atone for Ties to Slavery

October 19, 2006
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, Oct. 18 — Extensively documenting Brown University’s 18th-century ties to slavery, a university committee called Wednesday for the institution to make amends by building a memorial, creating a center for the study of slavery and injustice and increasing efforts to recruit minority students, particularly from Africa and the West Indies.

The Committee on Slavery and Justice, appointed three years ago by Brown’s president, Ruth J. Simmons, a great-granddaughter of slaves who is the first black president of an Ivy League institution, said in a report: “We cannot change the past. But an institution can hold itself accountable for the past, accepting its burdens and responsibilities along with its benefits and privileges.”

The report added, “In the present instance this means acknowledging and taking responsibility for Brown’s part in grievous crimes.”

The committee did not call for outright reparations, an idea that has support among some African-Americans and was a controversial issue at Brown several years ago. But the committee’s chairman, James T. Campbell, a history professor at Brown, said he believed the recommendations “are substantive and do indeed represent a form of repair.”

The committee also recommended that the university publicly and persistently acknowledge its slave ties, including during freshmen orientation. Dr. Campbell said he believed that the recommendations, if carried out, would represent a more concrete effort than that of any other American university to make amends for ties to slavery.

“I think it is unprecedented,” Dr. Campbell said, adding that a few other universities and colleges have established memorials, study programs or issued apologies, but not on the scale of the Brown recommendations. It was not clear how much the committee’s recommendations would cost to carry out.

“We’re not making a claim that somehow Brown is uniquely guilty,” Dr. Campbell said. “I think we’re making a claim that this is an aspect of our history that not anyone has fully come to terms with. This is a critical step in allowing an institution to move forward.”

Even in the North, a number of universities have ties to slavery. Harvard Law School was endowed by money its founder earned selling slaves for the sugar cane fields of Antigua. And at Yale, three scholars reported in 2001 that the university relied on slave-trading money for its first scholarships, endowed professorship and library endowment.

Dr. Simmons issued a letter in response to the report, soliciting comments from the Brown community and saying she had asked for the findings to be discussed at an open forum. She declined to give her own reaction, saying, “When it is appropriate to do so, I will issue a university response to the recommendations and suggest what we might do.”

She said “the committee deserves praise for demonstrating so steadfastly that there is no subject so controversial that it should not be submitted to serious study and debate.”

Initial reaction to the recommendations seemed to be appreciative.

“It sounds to me like this makes sense,” said Rhett S. Jones, a longtime professor of history and Africana studies at Brown. “I did not expect the committee would emerge saying, Well, you know, Brown should write a check.

“I never thought that was in the cards. I’m not sure I think it’s even appropriate that a university write a check, even though it’s pretty widely agreed on that Brown would not be where it is if it were not for slave money. These recommendations seem to me to be appropriate undertakings for the university.”

Brown’s ties to slavery are clear but also complex. The university’s founder, the Rev. James Manning, freed his only slave, but accepted donations from slave owners and traders, including the Brown family of Providence, R.I.. At least one of the Brown brothers, John, a treasurer of the college, was an active slave trader, but another brother, Moses, became a Quaker abolitionist, although he ran a textile factory that used cotton grown with slave labor.

University Hall, which houses Dr. Simmons’s office, was built by a crew with at least two slaves.

“Any institution in the United States that existed prior to 1865 was entangled in slavery, but the entanglements are particularly dense in Rhode Island,” Dr. Campbell said, noting that the state was the hub through which many slave ships traveled.

The issue caused friction at Brown in 2001, when the student newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, printed a full-page advertisement produced by a conservative writer, listing “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea And Racist Too.”

The advertisement, also run by other college newspapers, prompted protests by students who demanded that the paper pay “reparations” by donating its advertising fee or giving free advertising space to advocates of reparations.

The Brown committee was made up of 16 faculty members, students and administrators, and its research was extensive.

“The official history of Brown will have to be rewritten, entirely scrapped,” said Omer Bartov, a professor on the committee who specializes in studying the Holocaust and genocide.

The report cites examples of steps taken by other universities: a memorial unveiled last year by the University of North Carolina, a five-year program of workshops and activities at Emory University, and a 2004 vote by the faculty senate of the University of Alabama to apologize for previous faculty members having whipped slaves on campus.

Katie Zezima contributed reporting.

    Panel Suggests Brown U. Atone for Ties to Slavery, NYT, 19.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/education/19brown.html

King Papers, Back in Atlanta, Will Be Placed on Display

October 10, 2006
The New York Times
By BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Ga., Oct. 9 — A collection of some 10,000 papers, books and other personal items that belonged to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been returned to Atlanta and will go on public display in January, officials at Morehouse College announced Monday.

The material, which has been housed at Sotheby’s, the New York auction house, since 2003, was saved from the auction block in June after a group of business and civic leaders, led by Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, raised $32 million to buy the papers from the King family.

Last month, some 70 boxes of the material arrived in Atlanta in an armored, air-conditioned FedEx truck. Since then, archivists and librarians have begun to catalog the papers in preparation for the public exhibit, which begins on what would have been Dr. King’s 78th birthday on Jan. 15.

“Every time you open a folder or look at a document, you’ll see someone’s name that you’ve read in history,” said Karen L. Jefferson, head of archives and special collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center. The library serves three campuses, including Morehouse, Dr. King’s alma mater, which will eventually own the papers.

The collection includes historical gems like a draft of the “I Have a Dream” speech, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” There are also more mundane items like canceled checks, college transcripts and even a tan briefcase still holding Magic Shave lotion, Fabergé cologne and Alka-Seltzer.

“He’s just become such an icon,” Ms. Jefferson said. “I think what happens with the papers is they make him more personable, more human.”

For the time being, the papers will be housed at the Woodruff library, but they may be moved in a few years, either to anchor a proposed civil rights museum or to a new building built to house them on the Morehouse campus.

“We haven’t gotten to the point of thinking about what to do three to four years from now,” said Walter Massey, president of Morehouse.

For now, Dr. Massey said, the focus is on getting the papers, which have seldom been seen even by scholars, in front of the public as a way to thank the city that pulled together to get them. There are other collections of King papers at Boston University and at the King Center in Atlanta.

“It’s difficult to describe the full emotional impact that these papers have,” Dr. Massey said.

By showing the papers, the coalition that brought them back to Atlanta also hopes to inspire new donations to its cause, Dr. Massey said.

Of the $32 million price, $20 million has been pledged and $9 million collected.

College administrators also sought to allay the fears of researchers that getting access to the papers would be difficult.

“It is the very cornerstone of our involvement in the project,” said Phillip D. Howard, vice president for institutional advancement at Morehouse. “If we were not able to supply scholarly access to the papers, we would be out of the business of the King papers.”

    King Papers, Back in Atlanta, Will Be Placed on Display, NYT, 10.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/10/us/10king.html


 

NYT        October 7, 2006

Rosa Parks Won a Fight, but Left a Licensing Rift        NYT        8.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/business/yourmoney/08rosa.html

Rosa Parks Won a Fight,

but Left a Licensing Rift

October 8, 2006
The New York Times
By JEREMY W. PETERS and JULIE BOSMAN
DEARBORN, Mich.

IN the gift shop of the Henry Ford Museum, just steps away from the brightly painted city bus that Rosa Parks defiantly rode into history books 51 years ago, there are tributes of a very different sort to the woman who helped tear down the walls of racial segregation in America.

A T-shirt bearing an image of Bus 2857 from Montgomery, Ala., will set you back $24. For a mere $4.99, you can buy a refrigerator magnet with a picture of the bus. A poster of the famous, albeit staged, 1956 photo by United Press International of Mrs. Parks sitting in front of a white man on a different bus goes for $16. The word “Destiny” is written above the photo.

There are no fewer than five biographies of Mrs. Parks on sale in the gift shop, including a glossy hardcover picture book and a small paperback, “Don’t Know Much About Rosa Parks.”

And as far as Rosa Parks memorabilia goes, this is the tasteful stuff.

On eBay, one seller recently offered commemorative dog tags with her picture for $5.99, not including shipping. Also for sale online were a dishwasher-safe coffee cup bearing a likeness of Mrs. Parks — $11.21, shipping included — and an 8-by-10-inch photo of her in an open coffin after her death in October last year. “The rarest photograph of all,” boasted the caption on this $10 snapshot. The cemetery in Detroit where Mrs. Parks is buried recently raised prices for crypts near her grave to $60,000 from about $45,000.

Rosa Parks — civil rights symbol in life, marketing phenomenon in death — has become the centerpiece of the kind of posthumous peddling usually associated with athletes and Hollywood stars. While licensing experts estimate the current value of selling Mrs. Parks’s image at only six figures a year, they say that over time millions of dollars will be made by those who control her likeness. Mrs. Parks’s courage and standing have also made her one of the few recent African-American political figures, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whose image can generate handsome profits.

While the likenesses of historical and political figures, from George Washington to Ronald Reagan, are commonly plastered on all sorts of knickknacks, milking the image of Mrs. Parks offers a particularly resonant example of the fine line between good taste and bad, between memorialization and exploitation and between the positive and negative uses of hard-core business marketing.

Indeed, profiting from Mrs. Parks’s image has long drawn the ire of those who watch over her legacy. But faced with limited resources, her estate has found it impossible to stop everyone who sees dollar signs when they hear the name Rosa Parks.

Anita Peek, executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, the organization that Mrs. Parks charged with safeguarding her image, said that all of the jockeying around the civil rights hero has largely left her resigned to accept a time-worn truism.

“It’s America,” Ms. Peek says. “And if you can make a buck, someone’s going to try to do something.”

THE Parks Institute has decided that if it cannot beat the marketing pack, it might as well join it. In April, it hired CMG Worldwide, a company in Indianapolis that is a powerhouse in the world of celebrity licensing and merchandising. The company handles rights to such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Mark Twain. Type “CMG Worldwide” into Google, and a Who’s Who of celebrity Web sites pops up: Jean Harlow, Babe Ruth, Duke Ellington, Vince Lombardi and more, all carrying virtual warning labels bearing the CMG name.

RosaParks.com is next on CMG’s acquisition list. A cybersquatter currently controls the domain, and CMG is trying to gain the legal rights to it — without filing a lawsuit. “We’re in the process of getting it back,” said Mark Roesler, the chairman and chief executive of CMG. “We anticipate it being an amicable transfer.”

Mr. Roesler, a 25-year veteran of the licensing business, is accustomed to legal battles involving the Web. Nearly all of the celebrity estates that CMG represents have been engaged in disputes over domain names. “Typically, with a famous personality, someone who doesn’t have the legitimate right to it is hoping to gain something from it,” he said.

Corporate America is also hoping to capitalize on Mrs. Parks’s aura, and CMG recently negotiated an estimated six-figure deal with General Motors on behalf of the Parks estate. In a new 60-second Chevrolet commercial, the 1956 U.P.I. photo appears amid a blizzard of Americana images, including Hula Hoop dancers, Vietnam War demonstrators, Richard M. Nixon and Joe Louis.

Advertisers, after all, have become fond of exhuming dead celebrities to appear in commercials, and Mrs. Parks offers the added oomph of having been something more. She is revered and widely known for doing the right thing — giving her special cachet in the marketing business. Her likeness has already appeared in a well-known Apple Computer ad that affixed the label “Think Different” to the bus passenger photo.

Whether Mrs. Parks would have participated in any of this — or even condoned it — is, of course, a moot question.

“The great thing about dead celebrities is that they don’t show up and get in trouble any more,” said Jeff Lotman, the chief executive of Global Icons, a licensing agency in Los Angeles.

Decisions about how Mrs. Parks’s image is used and who profits from it are the subject of a legal dispute between her surviving family members and the executors of her estate. Twelve of Mrs. Parks’s 13 nieces and nephews, her closest surviving relatives, have challenged her will in a probate court in Detroit. Their aunt’s will leaves them out of the decision-making process and out of nearly all of the money when it comes to licensing her name and image. The two sides were unable to settle, and their lawyers are now taking depositions in preparation for a trial.

William McCauley, 47, one of Mrs. Parks’s nephews, is leading the family’s legal battle against her estate’s executors. Mr. McCauley said he began seeing his aunt’s image pop up in advertisements all over Detroit shortly after her death. One of those ads, which ran in The Detroit Free Press, showed his aunt’s smiling face, along with the dates of her birth and death, next to a logo for the Greektown Casino, a local gambling establishment. “What a ride,” the ad said in bold type.

“We were never approached,” said Mr. McCauley, a soft-spoken and reserved man. “I thought that was inappropriate. Especially without involving any family members to let them know what’s going on.”

Mr. McCauley said he and his siblings were challenging the will so they could gain control over marketing and licensing decisions involving their aunt’s image. “We can’t do anything about it right now,” he said. “We’re in court right now for that very reason.”

Uncertainty about the control of Mrs. Parks’s image has been heightened by the fact that she was surrounded by counselors of varying visions for her legacy, both political and business, from almost the moment that she became famous. “Over the years, Mrs. Parks has had a lot of advisers,” said Jon B. Gandelot, one of her former lawyers.

When Mrs. Parks was alive, decisions about using her name fell to her Parks Institute in Detroit, which she founded in 1987 with her longtime friend Elaine Eason Steele. Mrs. Parks herself was involved in deciding exactly when and where her likeness could appear until late in her life, when she suffered from dementia.

“She would approve and say, ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ or, ‘No, I won’t allow that,’ say, if it was her picture on a keychain or something,” said Shirley Kaigler, who was Mrs. Parks’s personal lawyer and advised the Parks Institute on licensing issues.

When Mrs. Parks died, control of her image — and over the cash generated by marketing it — fell to her estate. In 1998, seven years before her death, she appointed Mrs. Steele and Gregory J. Reed, a lawyer in Detroit, as her executors. In 2003, Mrs. Parks replaced Mr. Reed with a retired judge in Detroit, Adam Shakoor. After Mrs. Parks’s death, Mrs. Steele agreed to be replaced by Mr. McCauley, a move that Mrs. Parks’s circle of lawyers and advisers hoped would avoid a legal challenge from the McCauley family.

But the McCauley family and the estate were unable to agree on how to divvy up her property, and a court battle ensued. A judge recently removed Mr. Shakoor and Mr. McCauley as executors, replacing them with two local lawyers, John M. Chase and Melvin D. Jefferson. Both of those lawyers declined repeated requests for interviews.

Previously, the most notable struggle over Mrs. Parks’s affairs was a lawsuit that her advisers filed against LaFace Records, producers for OutKast, the hip-hop duo. OutKast recorded a song, “Rosa Parks,” (“Ah ha, hush that fuss/Everybody move to the back of the bus”) which appeared on its 1998 album, “Aquemini.” Mrs. Parks sued LaFace and various record distributors for $5 billion, contending that the song defamed her.

LaFace Records, and its parent company, Sony BMG Music, settled the case a few months before Mrs. Parks died, for an undisclosed amount.

During the OutKast litigation, Mr. McCauley’s family was vocal in its opposition, saying that Mrs. Parks was far too modest to have ever consented to a $5 billion lawsuit. They also said they doubted that she was aware the case was even going on.

At the time, Mrs. Parks’s relatives described her as feeble and apparently unaware of her surroundings. But even in instances when there may be consensus about exploitation of Mrs. Parks’s legacy, her family and the executors of her estate cannot agree on how aggressively to pursue those who make unauthorized use of the Parks name.

“It’s hard to police unless you have the financial wherewithal,” Ms. Kaigler said. “What do you do if they’re somebody down in Texas and you’re in Michigan?”

In fact, for those in charge of protecting and managing Mrs. Parks’s legacy, there are few clear examples for them to follow. The family of Dr. King has been famously aggressive and litigious when it comes to his image, likeness and properties — and it has made handsome sums along the way. Despite the disrepair of the King Center in recent years, Dr. King’s two sons have continued to collect six-figure salaries from the center — a situation that many in Atlanta viewed with distaste. The King Center did not respond to requests for comment.

BEFORE he died, Dr. King donated 80,000 pages of his papers to Boston University, where he received his doctorate, suggesting that he wanted his private papers to be freely available to researchers. His wife, Coretta, later tried to get them back but was unsuccessful. Then last June, the King family sold a separate 10,000-item collection from his archives for $32 million to a company that was hastily formed by a nonprofit organization to keep the papers in Atlanta, Dr. King’s birthplace. At the time, critics of the family accused it of appearing greedy.

The King family’s previous efforts to assert control over Dr. King’s image provoked even more scorn. In a lawsuit in 1996, the estate accused CBS of copyright infringement after the television network began promoting a video that contained clips of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. (The family later dropped the lawsuit in exchange for an undisclosed cash payment.) When USA Today published the same speech in 1993, the King family filed a lawsuit, which was later settled, contending copyright infringement.

The King family has always defended its strict management of Dr. King’s image and likeness, an approach that some marketing experts applaud.

“The more you say no, the better it is for the brand,” said Allen Adamson, the managing director of Landor Associates, a branding agency that is a unit of the WPP Group. The Parks family, Mr. Adamson, said, “has to be very careful because what you do not want to do is take someone whose image is as pristine and untouched as hers, and overuse it.”

The danger in overusing Mrs. Parks’s image, Mr. Adamson added, is that people could start to say, “How dare you commercialize what she did and how she did it?”

For the Parks estate, the scramble for a piece of the action began almost immediately after Mrs. Parks’s death, when entrepreneurs found out just how lucrative her name could be. Copies of the program from her funeral quickly appeared on eBay, selling for up to $200 each, according to a news report at the time. Even the cemetery where Mrs. Parks is buried drew accusations from her relatives that it was ghoulishly trying to cash in on her death.

The Rosa L. Parks Freedom Chapel, renamed shortly after Ms. Parks was interred there last November, is a small gray stone building that looks more like a one-room schoolhouse than a mausoleum. More than 100 years old, it is near the main gate of the Woodlawn Cemetery on Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s noisy and blighted north-south artery. Towering pine and oak trees ring the chapel, isolating it from the car dealerships and strip joints that line nearby streets.

Inside, past the shiny black granite headstone that marks the entrance to the mausoleum, Mrs. Parks’s crypt stands about 10 feet off the ground next to a stained glass window in the chapel’s main hall. It is an elegant and demure resting place. It is also quite expensive.

Woodlawn, owned by the national cemetery operator Mikocem, started charging a hefty premium for the crypts in the Parks chapel not long after the funeral. For the seven crypts nearest to Mrs. Parks, which fetched $45,000 to $50,000 last year, prices were raised to $60,000. More than three dozen other crypts in the outer hall of the chapel were repriced at $24,275 each as of last April; they had been $17,000 to $20,000 before Mrs. Parks’s interment.

THE cemetery has said it raised the prices to help defray the cost of renovating the chapel and donating Mrs. Parks’s crypt. One of the hallway crypts now belongs to Proof, the rap artist who was killed in a gunfight last spring.

“You get to be buried with Auntie Rosa for a price,” said her nephew, Mr. McCauley, as his voice rose in disgust and frustration. “We feel like her name is cheapened.”

So it is that the Parks Institute has allied itself with CMG, which has decided to pursue aggressively Internet interlopers, like cybersquatters, through the courts. Not everyone has fought for domain names successfully: cybersquatters control BruceSpringsteen.com and AlbertEinstein.com. But Mr. Roesler said he hopes that RosaParks.com will soon belong to people who have a claim to Mrs. Parks’s legacy.

The Rosa Park trinkets on eBay — photographs, pins stamped with her image, the dog tags — are all unauthorized, Mr. Roesler said. Still, blocking every Parks item on the Internet is neither feasible nor economical. So, sometimes, Mr. Roesler said, you have to let things slide.

“Our typical action would be to investigate the use and understand what the use was, and let them know they are infringing on the rights of our client,” Mr. Roesler said. “Does that mean we would file a lawsuit? We could.”

He went on: “It could be somebody who had very good intentions; it could be somebody who’s operating out of their home,” he said. “It doesn’t do anybody any good to kill a gnat with a sledgehammer.”

Mr. Roesler said future decisions about the appropriate use of Mrs. Parks’s image would take into account whether she is depicted in an appropriate historical context. “She is a symbol that stands for something,” Mr. Roesler said. “We will carefully scrutinize those and see that her intellectual property rights are protected. There will be selected uses that will be allowed.”

At the Henry Ford Museum, Bus 2857 (which the museum bought from a family in Alabama for about $500,000 in 2001) sits restored and repainted to look much as it did on the day when Mrs. Parks, by refusing to give her seat to a white man, helped set the course of the modern civil rights movement. Visitors pass by seemingly unaware of the lawsuits or the commercial enterprises that are increasingly intertwined with her legacy.

Nate Hollis, a 58-year-old from Alabama who runs a second-hand store in Highland Park, Mich., stood next to the bus on a recent afternoon. He said he knew little about infighting between Mrs. Parks’s relatives and the overseers of her estate, and said he vaguely knew of the controversies over the use of her name. He said it bothered him, but it did not change who Mrs. Parks was or what she stood for.

“She’s a national treasure,” he said. “And she should be treated like one.”

    Rosa Parks Won a Fight, but Left a Licensing Rift, NYT, 8.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/business/yourmoney/08rosa.html