Detroit & Rosa Parks

A poignant article by Henry Payne from the Detroit News, published in National Review. A snippet:

Parks’s burial in Detroit is a poignant irony: a woman that embodied the dream of black equality being laid to rest in a place that symbolizes the nightmare of urban black despair.

The problems of Detroit in 2005 are not the problems of Montgomery 50 years ago. Today, Detroit blacks have legal equality and black representatives in political office — yet their city is in crisis. Detroit’s crime rate ranks as one of the nation’s worst — a shocking 42 homicides per 100,000 citizens. (New York, by comparison, has seven. Los Angeles, 17.) These are largely black victims of black criminals. While officially 12 percent, the city’s unemployment rate is estimated closer to 30 percent as the population’s staggering 47-percent adult-illiteracy rate and high taxes make Detroit inhospitable to business.