Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the American civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, died on Monday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.Parks’ act of civil disobedience may seem a simple gesture of defiance today, but was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950’s Alabama. Arrested and convicted of violating segregation laws, Parks was fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted buses for over a year while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the law that enforced their second-class status.The events on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated America and transformed Martin Luther King Jr., then a 26-year-old preacher, into a major civil rights leader. In his book Stride toward Freedom, King wrote: “No one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realises that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer’.” —NYT
