Goodbye Rosa

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.

Mrs. 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."

Mrs. 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 Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.

Her simple reply when asked by the bus driver if she was going to give up her seat was, "No."

"Well, by God, I'm going to have you arrested," the driver said.

"You may do that," Parks told him.

That simple refusal to buckle to the hated whites-only laws in the American South would erupt into a boycott of the city's bus system by African-Americans that brought the company to its knees.

But more importantly, it focussed the world's attention on the unjust laws and discrimination faced by African-Americans every day.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this. 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," she once said in an interview.

The 381-day boycott was organized by a little-known black leader, Martin Luther King Jr.

It would also be the first real attack on the hated Jim Crow laws that had been in place in the South since the end of the Civil War. Those laws required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations. They also legally sanctioned racial discrimination that kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

Eventually, the civil rights movement that grew out of the Montgomery bus boycott was successful in lobbying for the passage of the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act.

For her part, Parks received so much attention that she was unable to find work in Alabama and moved to Detroit in 1957, where she went to work for Congressman John Conyers for the next 31 years.

She was the recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor in the U.S.

Rosa Parks was 92.

She died of natural causes at her home in Detroit.

CBC News Online