The Supreme Court sided with civil rights history over hip-hop Monday, allowing Rosa Parks to resume her lawsuit against OutKast and their label LaFace Records.
Without comment, the justices declined to intervene in the case in which the 90-year-old Parks had objected to OutKast’s 1998 song, “Rosa Parks,” which appeared on their double-platinum CD “Aquemini” and was nominated for a Grammy award.
While the lyrics do not refer to Parks by name, the chorus goes “Ah ha, hush that fuss/Everybody move to the back of the bus/Do you wanna bump and slump with us/We the type of people make the club get crunk.”
Parks became a pioneer in the civil rights movement in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat to a white man and would not move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Ala. Her arrest prompted Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to lead blacks on a boycott of the bus system. The year-long boycott led to court rulings outlawing racial segregation in public transportation nationwide.
Parks’ attorneys, who included Johnnie Cochran, argued that OutKast used Parks’ name without her permission in an attempt to cash in on her celebrity. Since the song had nothing to do with Parks, the title amounted to false advertising, her attorneys said. They said the song, which contains profanity, was a commercial misappropriation of her name and tainted her place in history. Parks wants all references to her removed from future releases.
Attorneys for Atlanta-based OutKast–a.k.a. Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin) and Big Boi (Antwan Patton)–argued that Parks is a public figure and the 1st Amendment guarantee of free speech allows the use of her name.
A U.S. district court judge in Michigan initially ruled in favor of OutKast and threw out the lawsuit, writing that the “titles of artistic works that use the names of public figures and celebrities, like the works themselves, are entitled to 1st Amendment protection from right of publicity claims.”
But in May, a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reversed that ruling and reinstated Parks’ suit. The claim of free speech and artistic freedom “as reason for appropriating Rosa Parks’ name for a song title does not absolve [OutKast] from potential liability for, in the words of Shakespeare, filching Rosa Parks’ good name,” the three-judge panel ruled.
OutKast and LaFace appealed that decision and on Monday the Supreme Court, in effect, upheld the Cincinnati panel’s ruling.
The case now returns to federal district court. OutKast currently has the No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 (“Hey Ya”) as well as a Top 10 album (“Speakerboxxx/The Love Below”).
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LYRICS IN QUESTION
“Ah ha, hush that fuss
Everybody move to the back of the bus
Do you wanna bump and slump with us
We the type of people make the club get crunk.”
–OutKast
Excerpt from the song “Rosa Parks,” on the group’s 1998 CD “Aquemini”
