Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks, whose refusal half a century ago to give up her seat on a bus to a white man sparked the US civil rights movement, has died aged 92.

Ms Parks was at home with close friends by her side when she died last night, her lawyer, Gregory Reed, said.

The seamstress's defiance of segregation laws on an Alabama bus changed the course of American history and led to her becoming known as the "mother of the civil rights movement".

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On December 1 1955, with 19th-century, post-civil war laws in place requiring the separation of the races in public throughout the US south, she was on a bus in Montgomery when a white man demanded her seat. Ms Parks, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, refused.

Earlier that year, two black Montgomery women had been arrested on the same charge, but Ms Parks was jailed and fined $14.

The incident triggered a boycott of the bus system, led by Martin Luther King, which lasted over a year.

"She stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here because of her," the mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, said late last night.

The former president Bill Clinton said Ms Parks was "a woman of great courage, grace and dignity" who was "an inspiration to me and to all who work for the day when we will be one America".

Speaking in 1992, Ms Parks said history too often maintained "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 organised by King, then a little-known Baptist minister, who went on to earn the Nobel peace prize for his civil rights work.

"At the time I was arrested, I had no idea it would turn into this," Ms Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."

The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the supreme court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal", marked the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

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

After taking her public stand, Ms Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband, Raymond, moved north to Detroit in 1957. She worked in the office of the Democratic congressman John Conyers from 1965 until she retired, in 1988. Mr Parks died in 1977.

Ms Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and a school were