Parks breathed life into civil rights movement
[size=-1]By LARRY COPELAND[/size]
[size=-1]Philadelphia Inquirer[/size]
When Rosa Parks, a quiet Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, refused to give up her seat on a city bus, she helped spark the black civil rights movement in the South.
Her spontaneous act of defiance that day in 1955 lent a spark to a movement that would, in the decade to follow, sweep across an entire region. And it provided the moment that propelled the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the national stage.
Her quiet grace against the entrenched racial segregation of the era made her a powerful and enduring symbol of that struggle and led her to be known as "the mother of the movement."
For generations of schoolchildren - particularly black children who grew up in the South of the 1960s - Parks, who died Monday, was a figure of near-epic dimension. She occupied a place in the pantheon of African-American heroes alongside the likes of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, of Marcus Garvey and Dr. King.
Yet throughout her 92 years, Parks remained humble and accessible - oblivious, it seemed, to her place in history.
"I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws of the South," she said in her autobiography. "I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around."
In her sunset years, she could be found, broom in hand, tidying the front stoop of the modest, west-side Detroit house where she lived alone. By then, she was frail, her face seasoned by life, her hair white, her step slowed. Even then, though, those dark eyes - made famous in a thousand photographs - were as full as ever of no-nonsense and steel. Except when she smiled: Parks' smile was beatific, and it caressed her whole face.
"I have never thought of myself as a hero," she said in a 1994 interview at her home. "I just did what seemed like the right thing to do.