Civil rights icon Parks dies
2005-10-25 08:35
Washington - Black 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. She was 92.
Parks died at her home in Detroit, Michigan, according to The Detroit News.
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 1955.
Her arrest so angered African Americans that they boycotted the Montgomery, Alabama buses for a year.
Protest
Parks' act was ahead of the civil rights movement and had little reason to believe that the 50 000 blacks in Montgomery would follow her lead and that her protest would result in little more than an arrest for her.
A young minister named Martin Luther King led the boycott as well as a non-violent movement that would change local, state and federal legislation in favour of black Americans.
Representative John Lewis of Georgia told CNN: "By sitting down, she was really standing up for all Americans."
"For more than 381 days, people walked the streets rather than ride segregated buses. They organised carpools. Rosa Parks' action inspired a mass non-violent movement, a movement of massive resistance against segregation and racial discrimination, not only in public transportation," said Lewis, who was part of that movement.
It was widely reported the Parks said she was too tired to move from her seat after a day's work as a seamstress in a downtown Montgomery department store.
Physically
"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day ... No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in," she said in a recent interview.
Black residents of Montgomery boycotted their bus system until the US Supreme Court ruled the segregated bus seats were illegal.
Parks and her husband lost their jobs, although an official at the department store where she worked said she was terminated because business was down, not because her action sparked the boycott.
Although the movement was non-violent, the white response was not. She left Montgomery for Detroit years later after continuing death threats.
- AFP