Rosa Parks, civil rights pioneer, dies at 92

DETROIT — Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday. She was 92.

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

Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement."

In Utah, the Rev. France Davis of Calvary Baptist Church called Parks' passing "a major loss that we will all regret because of her major role in the modern civil rights movement. She was the spark that lit the fire."

Jeanetta Williams, president of the NAACP Salt Lake branch, said, "I really admired her for the work that she did and the courageous stance that she took back in 1955. She began to break down those barriers where people were looking at what's right and what's wrong and the way that African-American people were being treated here in America."

At the time of Parks' historic action, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Parks was jailed. She also was 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 a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."