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On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala, a black woman refused to relinquish her seat on a city bus so a white man could sit there.

AP

Rosa Parks as she was being fingerprinted after being arrested.

That one act sparked 50,000 blacks to boycott the city’s buses for more than a year.

Rosa Lee Parks, the quiet, gentle woman who made the gesture during a time of blatant discrimnation, died Monday at the age of 92.

In 1955, 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.

Mrs. Parks, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

She refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.

AP

Rosa Parks in 1999.

Speaking in 1992, Mrs. Parks said history too often maintains “that my feet were hurting and I didn’t know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long.”

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. King, who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were “inherently unequal,” marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.

The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in U.S. Rep John Conyers’ Detroit office from 1965 until 1988.

Parks said she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit’s young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.

“Rosa Parks: My Story,” was published in February 1992. In 1994 she brought out “Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation,” and in 1996 a collection of letters called “Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today’s Youth.”

In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

“The only regret I have is that she didn’t live to see the 50th celebration and to see how we are acknowledging her greatness,” said Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright. “It’s a sad, sad day for Montgomery and a sad day for the world.”

Bright was among the many admirers mourning Park’s death Monday. They cited her act of civil disobedience as triggering a 381-day bus boycott led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the King and the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy Jr., remembered Parks on Monday, calling her “the right person at the right time in history.”

“Rosa Parks was known as the queen mother of the movement. She sat down so that her people could stand up,” Lowery said Monday night from his home in Atlanta.

Tuskegee Mayor Johnny Ford said he would order flags in the town where Parks was born as Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, to be flown at half-staff from Tuesday until after her funeral.

He said a street that was named after Mrs. Parks about 10 years ago intersects with Martin Luther King Blvd., the roads symbolically coming together like their namesakes did so many years ago.