Anyone who thinks that Rosa Parks was a simple seamstress who just got tired one day better take another look at the history. A former secretary of the NAACP and adviser to the NAACP Youth Council, Parks had been evicted from buses before.

The fact that she was a tiny, soft-spoken but firm woman belied the effect she had on the battle for equality. She was no accidental activist. After years of being forced to give up seats for white passengers and to sit or stand in the back, civil rights activists in Montgomery, Ala., decided that the time had come for change.

It came through Parks, who got the opportunity.

Her simple action on Dec. 1, 1955 — refusing to give in, to shuffle, to wearily accept that place lower than whites on a social ladder — might have been her path to glory. But she wasn't after glory. She was after equality.

And her simple action was a reminder that revolutions begin in single moments.

"Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it," Parks wrote in her 1994 book "Quiet Strength."

"I kept thinking about my mother and my grandparents, and how strong they were," she wrote. "I knew there was a possibility of being mistreated, but an opportunity was being given to me to do what I had asked of others."

Her arrest and trial led to a 381-day bus boycott that led to the desegregation of buses and trains across the South. Her name became history when the Supreme Court ruled in 1956 that segregated transportation violated the U.S. Constitution.

So many laws violated the Constitution in the 1940s and '50s that the Constitution itself lived as a shell of what the Founding Fathers had written.

It took a petite woman of 42 to remind America of what a roomful of men had signed.

As the mother of the civil rights movement, she set the tone for quiet refusal to accept the status quo, and her action would pave the way for a nonviolent movement that would elevate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to status as icon. Parks was a complex woman who understood the plight of her race. She had more heart and courage and compassion for the circumstances that have led to the black condition in poor neighborhoods in cities across the country than other black people could admit then or now.

That compassion was evident in August 1994, after a would-be young thief attacked her in her own house. In a later account of the incident, she wrote "I pray for this young man and the conditions in our country that have made him this way."

I can't forget her concern for that young man. I love her ability to see the place that birthed his anger.

Rosa Parks helped change the world in a quiet moment nearly 50 years ago. But her revolution hasn't ended.

Her greatest legacy can be found in the minds of young teenagers who don't know the names Julian Bond and Andrew Young, who barely know Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

But they know Rosa Parks.

When my phone rang with the news of her death, my daughter ran for her radio.

"Mom, Rosa Parks is in the hospital."

"No, she's dead, honey."

My 16-year-old looked a little sad. "Mom, she was history," she said.

"And what does she mean to us?"

"Freedom."

Freedom has become such an all-encompassing word that covers an ideal greater for the whole than is greater than the one. But in the 1950s and '60s, black Americans counted their freedoms in the daily things they could not do because of the color of their skin: use the nearest bathroom, sit at a lunch counter, drink from a "white" water fountain, shop in a lovely store, attend a good school.

When Rosa Parks refused to stand, she actually stood for a shift in the movement, which rose to another level from that quiet moment.

Every warrior who fought for change, who struggled for all people to be treated the same, deserves a place in history, deserves to have their name remembered. Rosa Parks didn't find a place in history. She created one. She became that moment. Where have all our flowers gone? Where are the Rosa Parkses who can refuse continued bigotry and discrimination now?

As my daughter said of Rosa Parks: "She was history."

What I want to know is: Who will make history now?

Rochelle Riley is a columnist for the Detroit Free Press.