Rosa Lee Parks, 92; Her Action Sparked Civil Rights Movement

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

DETROIT – Rosa Lee Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died yesterday. She was 92.


Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat of Michigan.


Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title “mother of the civil rights movement.”


At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants, and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.


The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,was riding on a city bus December 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.


Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.


Speaking in 1992, she said history too often maintains “that my feet were hurting and I didn’t know why 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.”


Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.


“At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this,” Parks said 30 years later. “It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.”


The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were “inherently unequal,” marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.


The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.


After taking her public stand for civil rights, Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957.She worked as an aide in Conyers’s Detroit office from 1965 until retiring September 30, 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.


Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named for her and a papier-mache likeness of her was featured in the city’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.


Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987,is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit’s young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.


“Rosa Parks: My Story” was published in February 1992. In 1994, she brought out “Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation,” and, in 1996, a collection of letters called “Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today’s Youth.”


She was among the civil rights leaders who addressed the Million Man March in October 1995.


In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor.


Parks received dozens of other awards, ranging from induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor to an NAACP Image Award for her 1999 appearance on CBS’ “Touched by an Angel.”


The Rosa Parks Library and Museum opened in November 2000 in Montgomery. The museum features a 1955-era bus and a video that recreates the conversation that preceded Parks’s arrest. “Are you going to stand up?” the bus driver asked. “No,” Parks answered. “Well, by God, I’m going to have you arrested,” the driver said. “You may do that,” Parks responded. Parks’s later years were not without difficult moments. In 1994,Parks’s home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53. She was treated at a hospital and released. The man, Joseph Skipper, pleaded guilty, blaming the crime on his drug problem.


The Parks Institute struggled financially since its inception. The charity’s principal activity – the annual Pathways to Freedom bus tour taking students to the sites of key events in the civil rights movement – routinely cost more money than the institute could raise.


She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Ala. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934. He also inspired her to become involved in the NAACP.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use