USATODAY.com - Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, passes away at 92

Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, passes away at 92
By Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY, 10/24/2005 10:32 PM

Rosa Parks, whose refusal a half-century ago to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Alabama launched a new era in the civil rights movement, died Monday. She was 92.

Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.

Parks' act of disobedience against the segregation laws of the South united blacks behind a victorious boycott of the Montgomery bus system. It also vaulted into national prominence a young minister who led the boycott and who would soon inspire a nationwide movement for equal rights for blacks: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"It's a cliché to say she was the mother of the civil rights movement, but she really was," said Julian Bond, chairman of the board of the NAACP. "She set in motion a movement that hasn't ended."

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress and a member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in December 1955, when a white man demanded her seat on a city bus. She refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. She was jailed for her act of defiance and fined $14.

Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by King. It led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision that said discrimination in public transportation was unconstitutional.

The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

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