Addie Ruth Fox Parker—a longtime elementary schoolteacher, civil rights advocate, pastor’s wife and pastor’s mother—died May 30. She was 105. She was born Dec. 14, 1917, in Jacksonville, Ala., to Cass and Jennie Taylor Fox. After graduating from Cobb High School in Anniston, Ala., she earned her undergraduate degree from Alabama A&M College—now Alabama A&M University—in Huntsville, where she played tennis and sang in the choir. She and Pastor Joseph C. Parker married on July 28, 1951, in Anniston, Ala. In the 1950s and 1960s, she served in the Civil Rights Movement as a dedicated and hard-working confidante, partner, participant and supporter of her husband, who was a racial justice advocate in Alabama. Starting in 1955, she stood alongside him as he became involved in the Montgomery bus boycott, the Montgomery Improvement Association, the Montgomery Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and Birmingham civil rights protests. She served with her husband’s Morehouse College schoolmate and friend, Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, as well as Ralph D. Abernathy and his wife Juanita Jones Abernathy. She was a Texas resident since 1972 and a member of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas. She also was an enthusiastic Dallas Cowboys fan, and for her 104th birthday, she was thrilled to receive a helmet signed by Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott. All four of her daughters followed in her footsteps, serving as schoolteachers, and her son became a Texas Baptist pastor and attorney-mediator. She was preceded in death by her husband Joseph C. Parker Sr. in 1987 and by four siblings—brothers Charles, Theodore and Thomas, and sister Milton Jo. She is survived by daughters Marvice J. Sims, Gail B. Parker, Lynne N. Wheelock and husband Todd, and Linda A. Zanders and husband Calvin; son Joseph C. Parker Jr. and wife J. LaVerne Morris-Parker; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A celebration of life memorial service is scheduled at 11 a.m. on June 9 at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
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