After an earlier run in Los Angeles, the play opened at Detroit's Music Hall last week and 63-year-old Rosa Parks was an honored guest. "It's a real challenge trying to portray the kind of person she is—very, very calm, very patient, gentle," says Kim Weston, 36, who plays Parks. (For dramatic purposes, Kim is carried from the bus after being arrested; actually Rosa walked off.)
The money from the premiere goes to the National Committee for the Rosa L. Parks Shrine, whose goal is not a shrine at all, but to build and maintain a modest home for Mrs. Parks. She now lives in a West Side two-family flat with her ailing husband and her mother, 88. Members of the committee include Coretta King, Esther Gordy Edwards (sister of Motown records chief Berry Gordy) and Harry Belafonte. Land has already been bought on 12th Street, the scene of the bloody 1967 race riot. Last month the street was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard, a rare exception to Detroit's policy against naming streets for living persons. At the ceremony the City Council president said, "By lending her name to it, Mrs. Parks has turned this street into a street of hope and dignity and pride."
She came to Detroit in 1957, 18 months after her arrest. A seamstress in Alabama, she has worked in the Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers Jr. since 1967. Once a full-time employee, she now limits her work to two or three mornings a week so she can care for her husband, Raymond, and her mother. Mrs. Parks returned to Montgomery last December for the 20th anniversary of her act of courage. "I still couldn't ride the bus," she says with a smile. "This time the drivers were on strike."
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