DETROIT, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- Civil rights icon Rosa Parks died Monday night in Detroit at age 92.
The woman who in 1955 Montgomery, Ala., refused to give up her seat in the front of a bus, had been in frail health since the late 1990s and suffered from dementia in recent years, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Park's refusal to give her seat to a white man inspired the young Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to organize 50,000 blacks to boycott Montgomery's buses and became the catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Parks moved from Alabama to Michigan in 1957 and in 1965 joined the staff of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
"She, as the mother of the new civil rights movement, has left an impact not just on the nation, but on the world," Conyers told CNN.
Parks received both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal for her work as the mother of the civil rights movement.
In 1995, Parks told the Free Press how she wanted to be remembered.
"I'd like people to say I'm a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings," she said.
