Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died last night aged 92.
Mrs Parks died at her home during the evening of natural causes, with close friends by her side.
She was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement".
Rosa Parks pictured at a ceremony in 1999 where she was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal
At that time, so-called Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodation throughout the South. Legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighbourhoods in the North.
The seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus on December 1st, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.
Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.
Speaking in 1992, Mrs Parks said history too often maintains "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 a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev Martin Luther King jr, who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.
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.
The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.