Images of regal warriors.

My friend Steve expressed anger to me over a Daily News cover reporting Rosa Parks' death, showing her mug shot as the front page image. He said this was the wrong image to choose and that it made her seem like a criminal. I disagreed, saying it was an iconic image of her struggle.

Errol Louis agrees with me:
Images of regal warriors

A wave of Daily News readers called and wrote to complain about our paper's decision to announce the death earlier this week of the legendary Rosa Parks by publishing a big front-page picture of the mug shot from her historic 1955 arrest for violating Alabama's segregation laws. There seems to be a widespread belief that the booking photo demeans Parks by portraying her as a common criminal...

...I couldn't disagree more.

The photo, reproduced here along with a similar booking shot of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the start of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, is beautiful, glorious, rich with meaning, and a powerful tool for teaching young people about the civil rights movement...