Beautiful Rosa Parks sits alone in the Montgomery, Ala., city bus she desegregated, an image endlessly replicated, most recently on an American postage stamp issued in February to commemorate Black History Month and what would have been Parks’s 100th birthday. By the time she died in 2005, Parks had become an American saint. President Bill Clinton gave her a Medal of Freedom in 1996; Congress awarded her a Gold Medal in 1999 (passed nearly unanimously — only Representative Ron Paul of Texas dissented); and after her death, her body lay in the Capitol Rotunda. She was the first woman to be so honored, and the first black woman to have a statue in her likeness placed in the National Statuary Hall of the Capitol. It was unveiled this year and positioned, House Speaker John Boehner pointed out, “right in the gaze” of Jefferson Davis, president of the ­Confederacy.

Parks stands for “the triumph of freedom — of democracy over dictatorship, free enterprise over state socialism, of tolerance over bigotry” (President Clinton). “Our nation was forever transformed” by her refusal to give up her seat, advancing “our journey toward justice and equality for all” (President Obama).

Quiet, lovely, light-skinned, well-dressed Mrs. Rosa Parks, in her hat and coat and eyeglasses, embodies the nonviolent overthrow of racism in America. She represents the best of Southern womanhood, a genteel contrast to those angry Northern black radicals clamoring for their rights. Her composure seems to indicate the correct way to bring about real change.

In 1955, Parks defied the humiliating Jim Crow policy requiring a black person of any age or sex to defer to any white person by standing so the white person could sit. Her refusal and subsequent arrest inspired a 381-day Montgomery bus boycott that led to sit-ins, marches, campaigns and, finally, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The movement and laws it prompted wrought a revolution in American conventions of race and inaugurated Martin Luther King Jr. as the conscience of America.