Related: US honors civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks

Photo dated Sept., 1996 shows then US president Bill Clinton standing with Rosa Parks during the Congressional Black Caucus dinner in Washington DC. (Photo: AFP)

    WASHINGTON, Oct. 25 (Xinhuanet) -- Rosa Parks, whose refusal a half-century ago to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Alabama launched a new era in the civil rights movement in the United States, has died. She was 92.

    Parks died on Monday evening of natural causes at her home in Michigan, USA Today reported Tuesday.

    Parks' act of disobedience against the segregation laws of the South united blacks behind a victorious boycott of the Montgomery bus system. It also vaulted into national prominence a young minister who led the boycott and who would soon inspire a nationwide movement for equal rights for blacks: Martin Luther King Jr.

    "It's a cliche to say she was the mother of the civil rights movement, but she was," said Julian Bond, chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "She set in motion a movement that hasn't ended," he said.

    Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress and a member of the local chapter of the NAACP in December 1955, when a white man demanded her seat on a city bus. She refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. She was jailed for her act of defiance and fined 14 US dollars.

    Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by King. It led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision that said discrimination in public transportation was unconstitutional.

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