US Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks Dead at 92

Radio Havana Cuba, 25 October 2005

Detroit, October 25 (RHC)-- African-American civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955 sparked a movement to end legally imposed racial segregation in the United States, has died in Detroit. She was 92.

Rosa Parks' health had been declining since the late 1990s. By then, she had stopped giving interviews and rarely appeared in public. In 1995, she said, I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings.

Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus when a white man requested it, as she was required to do in the southern United States in 1955. Her arrest so angered African-Americans that they boycotted the Montgomery, Alabama buses for more than one year. Her action was ahead of the civil rights movement and she had little reason to believe that the 50,000 African-Americans in Montgomery would follow her lead and that her protest would result in little more than an her arrest.

A young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. led the boycott as well as a non-violent movement that would change local, state and federal legislation in favor of Black Americans. Representative John Lewis of Georgia told reporters: By sitting down, Rosa Parks was really standing up for all Americans. Lewis went on to say that for more than 381 days, people walked the streets and organized carpools rather than ride segregated buses. Her action inspired a non-violent mass movement, a movement of massive resistance against segregation and racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks and her husband lost their jobs and although the movement was non-violent, the white response was not. She left Montgomery for Detroit years later after continuing death threats.