Detroit – A church packed with 4,000 mourners Wednesday celebrated the life of Rosa Parks in an impassioned, song-filled funeral, with a crowd of notables giving thanks for the humble woman who helped transform a nation.
“The woman we honored today held no public office, she wasn’t a wealthy woman … ,” said U.S. 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 scheduled three hours, 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, where she became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
People held hands and sang the civil-rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” as family members filed past her casket.
“Mother Parks, take your rest. You have certainly earned it,” said Bishop Charles Ellis of Greater Grace Temple.
Speakers described Parks, who died at 92, as a warrior and a woman of peace who never stopped working toward a future of racial equality.
“The world knows of Rosa Parks because of a single, simple act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry,” said former President Clinton, who presented Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.
