(Detroit, Michigan) – Rosa Parks, the Alabama seamstress whose soft-spoken refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, the first great mass action in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, died yesterday at 92. Parks died at her home in Detroit of natural causes, according to a spokesman for US Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan.

Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge of refusing to give up their seat. Parks was jailed and fined $14. Parks was an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Last year when New Paltz mayor Jason West announced he would perform same-sex weddings despite a state law barring them, he invoked Parks' name. "The people who would forbid gays from marrying in this country are those who would have made Rosa Parks sit in the back of the bus," West declared.

In 2004, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom made a speech at the John Kennedy School of Government at Harvard said that his issuing of some 4,000 same-sex marriage licenses last year was akin to the actions of Rosa Parks during the civil rights movement.

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