Two weeks ago, I told one of my reporters that a story slated to run on the front page of the Amsterdam News would remain there unless news flashed that Rosa Parks had died.

As it happened, she died earlier this week after years of fighting for social justice causes.

I had been spending a lot of time thinking about Parks and was wondering what would come of the 92-year-old matriarch of the civil rights movement.

As a student of the civil rights movement, I am fascinated by this period in American history, during which ordinary people put their lives on the line for a cause much bigger than themselves.

While Parks has become a household name, she was hardly known in 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat to a fellow white passenger. I don’t know if most Americans understand the significance of her involvement in the civil rights movement.

In short, she helped to spur one of the most successful campaigns in history to secure a set of rights for blacks. When Parks refused to yield her seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955, she was doing more than simply safeguarding her space on a bus. She was forcefully challenging the prevailing notion that blacks were inferior and thus should be treated accordingly. Her action, coupled with the Montgomery bus boycott that ensued, led to the integration of the city’s buses. It also marked the first, but not the last, public embarrassment the American government faced due to mistreatment of its citizens of color.

Of course, there were many blacks who refused to relinquish their seats on segregated buses long before Parks received widespread notoriety for doing so. But in the campaign to dismantle Jim Crow, Parks emerged as the ideal symbol to point out the viciousness of segregation.

Even some of the country’s most ardent racists at the time later expressed sorrow over the arrest of Parks, a seamstress and a member in good standing of the local NAACP who was hauled off to jail and force to pay $14 in bail for refusing to give up her seat.

My friend Stephan Lesher, who in 1955 was a young police reporter at the Montgomery Advertiser, was the first reporter to interview Parks. During a check of the police log that evening, Mr. Lesher, noticed that a “colored” woman had been arrested for failing to give up her seat on the bus. He later went to her arraignment and questioned her about the ordeal.

“She was very humble,” Mr. Lesher told me recently. “She didn’t say much, she just smiled.”

Mr. Lesher, a young Jewish reporter who hailed from Brooklyn and would go on to author a best-selling biography of George Wallace – the former governor of Alabama – said his coverage of Parks’s refusal to give up her seat sparked his personal interest in writing about the civil rights movement.

“The injustice that blacks faced just did not make sense to me,” Mr. Lesher said. “I just thought that it was wrong.”

For years, I have pointed to Parks and other living civil rights icons to prove to my adversaries that the state’s legal sanction of segregation did not happen that long ago.

Sadly, many of these heroic people are now passing, leaving a new generation to tell their stories. We must safeguard against efforts by some revisionists who try to minimize the horrific nature of this period. Blacks lived in a terrorist state.

Parks’s actions followed in a long tradition of black foot-soldiers who actively resisted the forces of white supremacy by publicly calling attention to the race problem in America. Although she has been honored with a postage stamp, a congressional medal, and the renaming of public schools across the nation, she continued to agitate and speak up for the rights of blacks.

“Her act of defiance against a powerful system showed each of us the importance of everything we do and the impact that our own acts of courage can have,” Rep. Charles Rangel said. “Her simple refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, crystallized our recognition of the immorality of the system and sparked the conscience of America.”

Mr. Watson is the executive editor of the New York Amsterdam News. He can be reached at jamalwats@aol.com.