Civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies /

 

Civil rights icon Rosa Parks dies 
  
Agencies 

Detroit: Rosa Parks, the black woman whose single handed protest sparked the civil rights revolution in America has died.

 

The 92-year-old icon of the racial equality movement died in her sleep on Monday surrounded by a small group of friends and family members, according to her lawyer Shirley Kaigler.

 

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress for a department store in Alabama when she caught a bus in the town of Montgomery on December 1, 1955.

 

Three stops after she got on, a white man boarded and had to stand. Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat for him and uttering the words: “I'm tired of being treated like a second-class citizen.”

 

Her arrest and subsequent court appearance sparked a boycott of the bus system, led by a Then unknown Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

 

The boycott lasted 381 days, and led to a US Supreme Court decision forcing Montgomery to desegregate its bus system.

 

Parks received the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1996 and Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in 1999.