'The Mother of the Freedom Movement,' Her Neighborhood Needs YOUR Help

55 years ago, Rosa Parks helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

Today, the government is bulldozing her old neighborhood. Here’s the real kicker: The homeowners are forced to pay the cost of demolition.

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Nobel prize-winning libertarian economist F.A. Hayek famously wrote that “the great aim of the struggle for liberty has been equality before the law.” There is no better example of this fundamental struggle than Rosa Parks, known today as The Mother of the Freedom Movement.

She refused to be treated as a second-class citizen. But her hometown of Montgomery, Ala., segregated blacks on public transits. Minorities were forced to sit in the back, forced to give up their seats to whites, and sometimes were left standing on the side of the road after paying their fare. Rosa stood up to the Big Government Bullies and said enough is enough. Her demand for equality before the law forever transformed America.

Rosa once said:

I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free . . . so other people would be also free.

Indeed, she made the world a better place. So how despicable is it that today officials in her old hometown are forcing people to give up their homes? The government is tearing down houses against the property owners’ will and then sticking them with the bill.

Christina Walsh of the Institute for Justice writes at the Daily Caller:

Imagine you come home from work one day to a notice on your front door that you have 45 days to demolish your house, or the city will do it for you. Oh, and you’re paying for it.

This is happening right now in Montgomery, Ala., and here is how it works: The city decides it doesn’t like your property for one reason or another, so it declares it a “public nuisance.” It mails you a notice that you have 45 days to demolish your property, at your expense, or the city will do it for you (and, of course, bill you).

Your tab with the city will constitute a lien on your property, and if you don’t pay it within 30 days . . . the city can sell your now-vacant land to the highest bidder for cash.

The victims of such abuse are often minorities. For decades, African-Americans across the country have disproportionately had their property rights violated by government officials. In the 1950s things got so bad that “urban renewal” became known as “negro removal.”

Dr. Mindy Fullilove, a research psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychiatry, authored a study for the Institute for Justice called Eminent Domain & African Americans. In it she writes:

[B]etween 1949 and 1973 . . . 2,532 projects were carried out in 992 cities that displaced one million people, two-thirds of them African American,” making blacks “five times more likely to be displaced than they should have been given their numbers in the population. . . . Eminent domain has become what the founding fathers sought to prevent: a tool that takes from the poor and the politically weak to give to the rich and politically powerful.

According to sources on the ground in Montgomery, hundreds of homes and properties have already been destroyed in the last five years, most or all of them owned by minorities. The state recently passed solid eminent domain reform to curtail property rights abuses, so–as Walsh explains–Montgomery is using a complex end-around to sanction their demolitions.

To be clear: What is happening to Rosa Parks’ historic neighborhood is not eminent domain abuse. That’s illegal now. Today’s abuses are occurring through an altogether different law. One major difference is that with eminent domain, the property owners are compensated for their loss. With today’s demolitions, the property owners are forced to foot the bill.

Jimmy McCall, seen in the video above, was building his dream house in Montgomery. And then the government came and bulldozed it:

It was my dream house and the day they tore it down my wife cried and my little girl cried. . . . They came and they tore down the house anyway. They have no regard for the rule of law. You know, they do what they want to do.

This weekend, Montgomery activists are teaming up with the Institute for Justice in a grassroots workshop. They will discuss strategies on how to empower themselves and protect their most basic rights.

Will you join in this campaign?

Do you have any friends or family in the Montgomery area to notify about Saturday’s workshop? Do you have a blog where you can raise awareness about this outrage? Will you post something about these abuses on your facebook page? Whatever you can do, please do. Details on the event are available here.

If we are going to succeed in protecting our rights, we have to work together. And remain vigilant.