ED GORDON, host:
From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon.
Rosa Parks, the woman who inspired the civil rights movement by refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, died last night. She was 92. She passed away at her home in Detroit surrounded by friends and family. Jerome Vaughn of Detroit Public Radio has this report.
JEROME VAUGHN reporting:
Shortly after news of Parks' death became public, notable figures began coming to her Detroit apartment building to pay their respects.
Mayor KWAME KILPATRICK (Detroit): That energy and that spirit and what she gave this world cannot die today. We have to remember her, remember her work, and we have to celebrate it, commemorate it and make sure it continues to live on.
VAUGHN: Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick says only Dr. Martin Luther King played a more important role in the modern-day civil rights movement.
Mayor KILPATRICK: And what she's meant to this landscape of the world, not just me, is that young kids like me grew up in a different world because she changed it. I grew up believing I could be anything I wanted to be, you know. It's nothing to me to think that you could be a doctor or a lawyer or a mayor, and I know in that segregated South that she was in, it took that kind of courage to make me believe that.
VAUGHN: Parks was labeled as the mother of the civil rights movement because of a single act of defiance on December 1st, 1955. A white man entered the segregated bus she was riding in Montgomery, Alabama, and asked for her seat. She refused, even though the law at the time forced blacks to relinquish their seats. Parks was arrested. A local preacher got word of the arrest and became involved in the case. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then minister of a small Baptist church in Montgomery, joined with other civil rights activists to organize a boycott of the city's bus system. Tens of thousands of black residents refused to ride the buses. Legal action followed, and a year later the US Supreme Court declared segregation illegal on the city's bus system.
After receiving several death threats, Parks and her husband moved to Detroit in 1957. She joined the staff of Congressman John Conyers in 1965 and worked there until she retired in 1988. Speaking in a 1995 interview, Parks said her message has always been a simple one.
Ms. ROSA PARKS: Well, I would like for people to be concerned about human beings, not be prejudiced against people because of their race and color, for any particular reason, and that if you remove prejudice from our own lives and our own beliefs, then we can perhaps encourage others to do likewise.
VAUGHN: Parks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996 for her work in the civil rights movement. In 1999 she received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor. Representative Richard Gephardt was among those thanking Parks.
Representative RICHARD GEPHARDT (Missouri): A simple act of a brave woman helped a great nation reach its unfulfilled promise for all of its people.
VAUGHN: Parks made very few public appearances after the mid-1990s when her health began to fade. Congressman John Conyers says he'll work to establish some form of national recognition for Rosa Parks. Funeral arrangements for the civil rights pioneer haven't been completed. For NPR News, I'm Jerome Vaughn in Detroit.
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