Editorial: Rosa Parks: 1913 - 2005

Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005 | 7:52 a.m.

Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress considered the one-woman catalyst for the civil rights movement, died in much the same way she changed the world: quietly.

Parks was 92 when she died of natural causes Monday at her home in Detroit -- nearly 50 years after her soft-spoken refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., inspired a young minister, Martin Luther King Jr., and sparked the bus boycott that became the first mass demonstration of the civil rights movement.

In 1955, Alabama law reserved the first 10 seats of public buses for whites. The last 10 were for blacks. Seating in the middle rows was at the driver's discretion, which meant blacks were told to give up their seats if a white passenger needed one.

After finishing her shift as an assistant tailor at Montgomery Fair department store on Dec. 1, 1955, Parks sat in one of the middle rows of the bus. When white passengers filled their section and one was left standing, the bus driver told Parks and three other black passengers near her to move.

The other three did. She didn't. She simply said, "No."

Parks was arrested, convicted and fined $14. Days after her arrest, the relatively new and unknown pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- King -- was asked to oversee a citywide bus boycott in honor of Parks' act and conviction.

The boycott lasted 381 days and made a national figure out of King, ending one day after injunctions served on Montgomery officials enforced a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Parks' case that declared bus segregation unconstitutional.

Parks' simple act was as courageous as they came in the 1950s when everything, from schools and buses to businesses and water fountains, was divided by race, often by law. Blacks who violated the rules could face beatings or lynchings that weren't prosecuted. King's home was bombed a month after the bus boycott started.

It was for these reasons that a woman's quiet act of civil disobedience inspired a generation, set a course for civil rights victories and illustrated that one person can make a difference -- without anger or violence.

"People always say that I was tired, but that wasn't true," Parks wrote of that bus ride in her 1992 autobiography. "I was not tired physically ... No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."