DETROIT – A church packed with 4,000 mourners celebrated the life of Rosa Parks on Wednesday in an impassioned, song-filled funeral, with a crowd of notables giving thanks for the humble woman whose dignity and defiance helped transform a nation.
“The woman we honored today held no public office, she wasn’t a wealthy woman, didn’t appear in the society pages,” said Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. “And yet, when the history of this country is written, it is this small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered long after the names of senators and presidents have been forgotten.”
The funeral, which stretched four hours past its three-hour scheduled time, followed a week of remembrances during which Parks’ coffin was brought from Detroit, where she died Oct. 24; to Montgomery, Ala., where she sparked the civil rights movement 50 years ago by refusing to give her bus seat to a white man; to Washington, D.C., where she became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
Those in the audience held hands and sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” as family members filed past her casket before it was closed in the funeral’s first hour.
“Mother Parks, take your rest. You have certainly earned it,” said Bishop Charles Ellis III of Greater Grace Temple, who led the service.
Speakers described Parks, who died at 92, as both a warrior and a woman of peace who never stopped working toward a future of racial equality.
Parks was a 42-year-old tailor’s assistant at a Montgomery department store in December 1955 when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus. Her act triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Associated Press
The Rev. Jesse Jackson touches Rosa Parks’ casket Wednesday during her funeral in Detroit.
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