ROSA PARKS DEAD AT 92

A great American has passed away.

Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose soft-spoken refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, the first great mass action in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, died yesterday. She was 92.

Mrs. Parks died at her home in Detroit of natural causes, according to a spokesman for US Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan.

The boycott brought to national prominence a 26-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. He later inscribed a copy of his book "Stride Toward Freedom" to Mrs. Parks, "Whose creative witness," he wrote, "was the great force that led to the modern stride toward freedom." (full article)