Johnnie Cochran, now an attorney for civil rights figure Rosa Parks, asked a federal appeals court in Cincinnati Friday to reinstate her lawsuit again OutKast on the grounds that they are misusing her name in a tune.
Attorneys for the 88-year-old Parks argued that the Atlanta area group used her name in a triple-platinum hit and Grammy-nominated single “Rosa Parks” in the 15-track 1998 album LP Aquemini (LaFace/Arista) without her permission and that she was offended by alleged racial slurs in the tune.
OutKast’s attorney, Joseph Beck, argues that the First Amendment protects the tune and that the rap group does not have to compensate her. U.S. District Judge Barbara Hackett ruled for OutKast in a 1999 pretrial decision.
At the Friday hearing, Cochran implored the 6th U.S. District Court of Appeals to send the case back to Hackett in Ann Arbor, Mich. for trial. U.S. appeals judges Alan E. Norris, R. Guy Cole Jr., and John D. Holschuh unanimously took the case under review but did not guarantee a ruling on Cochran’s request.
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Park’s 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man in the colored section of a bus in the Montgomery, Ala. touched off a massive full-scale effort against Jim Crow and transformed the African-American seamstress into a Civil Rights Movement icon. She currently lives in Detroit, where she and her immediate family moved in the 1950s because of harassment and ostracizing by Montgomery’s pro-Jim Crow whites for that moment in civil disobedience and her subsequent civil rights organizing in the South.
