"Civil rights icon Rosa Parks, 92, dies"

Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose simple act of defiance on a segregated Montgomery bus in 1955 stirred the nonviolent protests of the modern civil rights movement and catapulted an unknown minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to international prominence, died Monday of natural causes at her Detroit home.

She was 92.

Often called the mother of the movement that led to the dismantling of institutionalized segregation in the South, Parks became a symbol of human dignity when she was jailed for refusing to relinquish her bus seat to a white person when she was riding home from work on the evening of Dec. 1, 1955.

Her arrest for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws galvanized Montgomery's blacks, who boycotted the city's buses for 381 days until the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.

Memorialized in poetry, dance and song, Parks was, by most accounts, both simpler and more complex than the mythology that grew around her.

She was born Feb. 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Ala., to Leona Edwards, a teacher, and James McCauley, a carpenter and builder. Her parents split up when she was 5, causing her mother to move Rosa and her younger brother Sylvester to live with family in Pine Level, a small town near Montgomery.

Some of her early memories were of white people who treated blacks kindly, particularly a Yankee soldier who said she was cute and "treated me like I was just another little girl, not a little black girl," Parks wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "Rosa Parks: My Story."

But she also remembered an old black man named Gus Vaughn who refused to work for whites. And she remembered how her grandfather kept a gun by his side to protect the family against raids by the Ku Klux Klan.

The earliest hint of the fortitude that would bolt her to a bus seat years later may have come when she 10. She had encountered on the road near her home a white boy named Franklin, who uttered some offensive words and threatened to hit her. Young Rosa picked up a brick and dared him to strike.

Her grandmother was horrified by Rosa's behavior. You'll be lynched before you turn 20 if you keep standing up to whites, she scolded.

Her mother was her only teacher until she was 11, when she was sent to the Montgomery Industrial School. Founded and staffed by whites to educate black children, the school was burned down twice by arsonists, and the faculty was ostracized by the white community.

She went to high school at a laboratory school run by the Alabama State Teachers College for Negroes, but was forced to drop out to care for her grandmother and later for her mother. She went back to school for her degree in 1933, after she married Raymond Parks, a Montgomery barber.

After her marriage, Parks held a succession of jobs, from domestic worker to hospital aide. To get to work, she rode the bus, as the majority of blacks did.

After the protests and boycott, and fed up with telephone death threats and worried about the firebombings of supporters' houses, Parks moved to Detroit in August 1957, to live near her younger brother. In 1958, Parks accepted a job at Hampton Institute in Virginia as a hostess at an inn, but there wasn't room for her husband and mother, and she moved back after a year and began working as a seamstress.

In 1987, with the help of Elaine Eason Steele, Parks founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Improvement, a youth assistance organization in Detroit. Its basic program takes young people on an educational tour that visits sites of importance in the civil rights movement, from the Underground Railroad on.

Even after that, Parks' life remained difficult. She was hospitalized in 1994 after a burglar broke into her house and beat and robbed her. After her recovery, she moved to a high-rise building in downtown Detroit. Five years later, upset at the unauthorized use of her name in a title of a song by the rap group OutKast, she sued. The suit was unsuccessful.

Near the end of her life, accolades belatedly arrived. Historians noted that she had often been left off the dais at anniversary events of the rights movement. She was a late addition to the Detroit greeting committee when Nelson Mandela came to the United States in 1990. But upon spotting her in the reception line, historian Brinkley said, the Nobel Peace Prize winner paid tribute by chanting her name.

A museum-and-library facility on the Montgomery corner where she boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus is named after her. She was given the Medal of Honor, the highest award that the U.S. government bestows, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. More than 40 colleges and universities gave her honorary doctorates, and her name is cited in virtually every U.S. history book that addresses the civil rights movement.