Rosa Parks, civil rights pioneer, dead at 92

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

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."

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.