Rosa Parks

One day you're an unknown Negro seamstress in the segregated South. The next day, you're a legend whose very name evokes hope and change for the better in an America that lives up to her ideals.

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.

Mrs. Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich.

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." [SNIP]

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.

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.

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. [SNIP]

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

Amazing how small events can ripple out into meaningful change.

Rest in Peace, Mrs. Parks. You've definitely earned it.