Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dead at age 92.

US Civil Rights Icon Parks Dies

Rosa Parks, the black woman whose 1955 protest action in Alabama marked the start of the modern US civil rights movement, has died at the age of 92.

Mrs Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus prompted a mass black boycott of buses, organised by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr.

His protest movement brought about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in the US.

Mrs Parks' lawyer said she died in her sleep at her home in Detroit, Michigan.

"She sat down in order that we all might stand up - and the walls of segregation came down," civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said.

'I had a right'

Mrs Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress when she made history.

She was very humble, she was soft-spoken, but inside she had a determination that was quite fierce
Democratic Congressman John Conyers

1956: King convicted over bus boycott

On 1 December 1955, she was sitting on a bus in Montgomery when a white man demanded her seat.

Mrs Parks refused, defying the rules which required blacks to give up their seats to whites.

She was arrested and fined $14.

Mrs Parks was not the first black Montgomery bus rider to be detained for refusing to give up a seat, but she was the first to challenge the law.

For years before her arrest, Mrs Parks had been active with local civil rights groups, which were looking for a test case to fight the city's segregation laws.

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organised by the then little-known Rev Luther King Jr.

The protest led to the desegregation of the transport system.

Mrs Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957, after she lost her job and received numerous death threats in Alabama.

She worked as an aide in the Detroit office of Democratic Congressman John Conyers from 1965 until she retired in 1988.

Speaking in 1992, Mrs Parks said of her famous bus protest: "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."

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, and the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honour, three years later.

She was "an almost saint-like person," Congressman Conyers said.

"She was very humble, she was soft-spoken, but inside she had a determination that was quite fierce."

R.I.P Rosa Parks.