– Rosa Parks passes into history…

Today, Rosa Parks died. She was the black lady who did not give her seat to a white man… who insisted it was his. She thought otherwise. The resolve to disagree started a movement that would change the shape of this country.. USA… irretrievably!

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

Mrs. Parks died at her home of natural causes, said Karen Morgan, a spokeswoman for U.S. Rep. John Conyers (news, bio, voting record), D-Mich.

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks holds the hand of a well-wisher at a ceremony honoring the 46th anniversary of her arrest for civil disobedience Saturday, Dec. 1, 2001, at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday Oct. 24, 2005. She was 92. (AP Photo/Paul Warner)

Mrs. 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.”

A visitor to the Henry Ford Museum looks inside the actual bus on which civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala. in 1955, Saturday, Dec. 1, 2001, at the museum in Dearborn, Mich.

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.