Our correspondent Gary Younge has sent us these words from New York on the death of 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. You can read Gary's full article here, and listen to his audio dispatch here.
"Y'all better make it light on yourself and let me have those seats," bus driver James Blake told three black passengers on the fifth row of his bus when it stopped outside the Empire Theatre in Montgomery, Alabama.
Two gave up their places so a white man could sit down. Rosa Parks stayed put.
"If you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested," said Mr Blake. "You may do that," said Parks.
And so with a passive-aggressive act of political rebellion against the racism of the Deep South, Ms Parks, who died yesterday aged 92, took her stand by keeping her seat. In so doing the 42-year-old seamstress gave voice to a spirit of resistance in a place and at a time when the world preferred black women to remain silent. Her throat was so dry after the incident that she longed for a drink of water. It would remain parched for some time because the water fountain at the city jail was for whites only.
Her subsequent arrest sparked a chain reaction that started the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement that transformed the apartheid of America's southern states from a local idiosyncrasy to an international scandal.
It was her individual courage that triggered the collective display of defiance that turned a previously unknown 26-year-old preacher, Martin Luther King, into a household name.
