Act of de1ance made Parks ‘ mother’ of movement

Nation pays homage to civil rights pioneer

Civil rights heroine Rosa Parks was remembered Tuesday as a quiet revolutionary whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus changed American history.

Parks, who died Monday in Detroit at 92, was “ one of the most inspiring women of the 20th century,” said President Bush. “ Her show of de ance was an act of personal courage that moved millions.”

Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for Rep. John Conyers, D- Mich. Funeral arrangementswere pending.

In 1955, Parkswas a 42- yearold seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., and a member of the local NAACP. That December, a white man demanded her seat on a city bus. She refused, despite Jim Crow laws requiring blacks to yield seats to whites.

She was jailed and ned $ 14. But what seemed a small act of civil disobedience helped ignite the civil rights movement.

Parks “ must be looked upon as not just the mother of the modern civil rights movement; she must be looked upon as one of the mothers of the new Parks: Died Monday at her Detroit home of natural causes. America, the new South,” said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a veteran of the civil rights era.

Her action sparked a 381-day bus boycott that led to a 1956 Supreme Court ruling that discrimination in public transportation was unconstitutional.

The boycott’s leader: a young minister, Martin Luther King Jr. The movement inspired by Parks’ action culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

Parks earned the nation’s highest honors. In 1996, President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

“ Her refusal to be treated as a second-class citizen . . . struck a blowto racial segregation and sparked a movement that broke the back of Jim Crow,” Clinton said. “ She was an inspiration to me.”

In 1992, Parks said history too often maintains “ that my feet were hurting and I didn’t knowwhy 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.” Contributing: Tom Vanden Brook and wire reports

By William Philpott, Reuters