Bringing a Civil Rights Lesson Home : Education: Teacher Liz Hamilton took out a $10,000 loan to bring Rosa Parks, a pivotal figure in civil rights history, to San Diego.

Liz Hamilton was so moved after screening a music video tribute to Rosa Parks for her Mesa College students that she took out a $10,000 bank loan to bring the pioneer civil rights activist to San Diego next week.

“I asked myself: What is more valuable, the message of Rosa Parks or a Honda Civic?” Hamilton said of her visit to the bank in December. She had just purchased that model new car for $9,500. “Was $10,000 worth it to bring Rosa Parks here and be a catalyst for schoolchildren? I said yes.”

Hamilton, a San Diego music instructor and concert performer for more than two decades, can barely sit still long enough to explain her enthusiasm, so excited is she over the upcoming visit, which will coincide with Parks’ 79th birthday.

Hamilton has never even met Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955 just because she was black sparked her pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to begin the modern-day civil rights movement.

But Hamilton is convinced that people like Parks--ordinary citizens with the courage to take risks--have the presence to persuade anyone, burned-out adult or jaded child, to make a positive difference in this world, big or small.

Parks, now a Detroit resident, today spends much of her time with the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, a foundation to boost the potential in children by acquainting them with civil rights history and social action. The $10,000 fee goes to the institute.

“I’m just a twerp who made a phone call,” Hamilton said in self-effacement of her role, and she rejects any notion that willingness to foot the bill should bring her the spotlight.

“It probably helped that the loan officer was a former student of mine!” Hamilton said with a laughed. “And I gave him an A.”

She’s also quick to credit community and academic leaders who helped with the nitty-gritty details vital to making Parks’ two-day visit a success. The highlight will be a question-and-answer session with more than 1,200 county schoolchildren Feb. 5.

Yet there’s obviously more to Hamilton than that of telephone operator, especially when Mesa college dean Betty Jo Tucker calls her “one of the finest professors I’ve ever seen” across Tucker’s years of experience at eight educational institutions.

Hamilton describes herself as a “hopeless optimist,” and she has a ready smile and disarming appearance--the archetypal disheveled professor with three bags crammed with notes and books slung over her shoulders.

She discounts her professional musical prowess by noting she’s played everywhere “from the harpsichord with the San Diego Symphony to piano with (the now defunct) Organ Power Pizza parlor.”

But Hamilton has a serious side that bubbles like a wellspring, especially when pricked with a question concerning her admiration of Rosa Parks.

“This isn’t about making Mrs. Parks into a living saint,” Hamilton insisted. “She’s not interested in that--and I’m not, either. She’s not a do-gooder; she’s interested in people seeing how they can help themselves and make contributions to society.

“I like to think that’s my role as a teacher as well.”

It was in her course on multicultural music last month where Hamilton screened a television documentary on the Neville Brothers, a New Orleans rhythm-and-blues duo, which included their “Thank You, Sister Rosa” song of appreciation.

“Thank you, Miss Rosa, you are the spark. You started our freedom movement, thank you Sister Rosa Parks,” Hamilton hummed at the piano, adding that she now often finds the lyrics dancing in her head.

In showing the video to her class, Hamilton realized how few of her students knew of Parks. They were open to learning, however, in no small part due to Hamilton’s efforts to “turn on their minds” as part of the multicultural course, she said.

“So many of them enter the required class rolling their eyes and folding their arms----in essence to ‘put down’ the course, that they are somehow ‘victims’ without even saying a word,” she said. “My job is to show them that this music, African, Asian, classical, all the world’s music, is a part of them, a part of everyone.

“I don’t want to sound naive, but I’m using music as a vehicle to draw students out and get them to look at themselves and the world differently.”

In a larger sense, Hamilton believes that is what Parks can tell people.

“She shows that there are no little guys, only little attitudes,” Hamilton said. “She provided an example that is courageous, risking personal danger, for the benefit of others as well as herself. . . . Such transcending of fear and self-centeredness empowers others to know they have the same capability inside.”

After refusing to give up her seat, Parks was arrested, booked, fingerprinted, jailed and fined. Her act spurred a yearlong boycott of Montgomery’s buses by blacks, who were 70% of the riders, and brought King to national attention.

The boycott ended after the U.S. Supreme Court held that laws requiring segregated bus seating were unconstitutional.

Hamilton runs another Mesa College course, this one for budding poets, actors, and others potentially in the public eye who are having a difficult time coping with how to balance the creativity and rage that often competes within them.

“Just look at all the substance abuse, the drinking, the depression among artists and how they’ll sabotage their own lives if they aren’t able to work through the pain that competes with the talent.

“Knowing the example of Rosa Parks can help people in those kinds of situations attempt to channel their anger” constructively.

Is Hamilton indeed naive? she asked rhetorically. Will the schoolchildren, the majority of them teen-agers, see Parks as anything more than a historical relic, as someone whose values they should and can emulate?

“I just feel that I’ve seen enough people who are able to live their values, and Rosa Parks can be an antidote to the message of violence so out there today,” Hamilton insists. “Already, the eyes of at least a few students have lit up at the mention of her name; ‘Yeah, she’s the one who got me out of the back of the bus,’ one shouted to me.”

In any event, Hamilton is putting her faith into the same magic that touched her during the showing of the Neville Brothers video. That magic “can at least expose children, however briefly, to the spirit that Rosa Parks represents. . . . If necessary, you begin one person at a time.”

One of the Neville brothers, Cyril Neville, along with his wife and children, will be in San Diego next week to introduce Parks to the schoolchildren and lead them in the “Sister Rosa” song.

He will also participate in a benefit gathering Feb. 4, intended both to celebrate the birthday of Parks and to raise money to pay back at least part of Hamilton’s $10,000 loan. The $15-a-person public event, at the Scottish Rite Memorial Center in Mission Valley, is sponsored by the Mesa College Humanities Institute.