US civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies at 92
At the time, she couldn’t have known it would secure her a revered place in American history. But her one small act of defiance galvanised a generation of activists, including a young Martin Luther King, and earned her the title “mother of the civil rights movement”.
Ms Parks died late on Monday at her home of natural causes, with close friends by her side, said Gregory Reed, an attorney who represented her for the past 15 years. She was 92.
Monique Reynolds, 37, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, called Ms Parks an inspiration who had lived to see the changes brought about by the civil rights movement.
“Martin Luther King never saw this, Malcolm X never saw this,” said Ms Reynolds, who now lives in Detroit. “She was able to see this and enjoy it.”
At the time of her 1955 protest, segregation 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 neighbourhoods in the north.
The Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, was riding on a city bus on December 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
Ms 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 Ms 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 organised by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev Martin Luther King, 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,” Ms 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.”
The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the US Supreme Court’s landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were “inherently unequal”, marked the start of the modern civil rights movement in the US.
The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.
After taking her public stand for civil rights, Ms Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957.
She worked as an aide in Congressman John Conyers’s Detroit office from 1965 until retiring on September 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.
Rosa Parks: My Story was published in February 1992. In 1994 she brought out Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation, and in 1996 a collection of letters called Dear Mrs Parks: A Dialogue With Today’s Youth.
She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934.
Her later years were not without difficult moments.
Ms Parks rarely was seen in public after 2001, when she cancelled a meeting with President Bush.
In court papers filed in September 2004 in connection with her lawsuit over the rap group OutKast’s song Rosa Parks, her lawyers said she had dementia. After losing the OutKast lawsuit, Reed, her attorney, said Ms Parks “has once again suffered the pains of exploitation”. A later suit against OutKast’s record company was settled out of court.
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