Civil rights pioneer passes

October 25, 2005 - 1:37PM
Civil rights  ...  1956 mug shot of Rosa Parks.

Civil rights ... 1956 mug shot of Rosa Parks.
Photo: AP

Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern US civil rights movement, has died at the age of 92.

Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for US Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.



Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, and an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was on a city bus on December 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.


Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organised by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.


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 United States.


After taking her public stand for civil rights, 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 Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring on September 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.



