Barack Obama

Seven-hour funeral pays tribute to Parks

Thursday, November 3, 2005

Associated Press

The night before he attended Rosa Parks' funeral, Richard Johnson of Detroit spent four hours creating a sketch of the civil rights matriarch, who was buried Wednesday.

DETROIT -- Perhaps it wasn't the most fitting memorial for Rosa Parks: dozens of prominent speakers and thousands of mourners at a seven-hour funeral that followed remembrances in Alabama and Washington.

Parks would have been shocked, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said, "because this wasn't what she was about. She wasn't about being a big shot."

But there was too much gratitude, too much respect Wednesday in Greater Grace Temple for the mourners to let this quiet woman go quietly.

Many had accomplished great things in their lives, things they knew might have be impossible if, 50 years ago, she hadn't decided she had had enough of being treated as something less than a human being.

"Thank you for sacrificing for us," said Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who had not been born when Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, an act that would catapult the civil rights movement. "Thank you for praying when we were too cool and too cute to pray for ourselves. Thank you for allowing us to step on your mighty shoulders."

Parks was described in the service as both a warrior and a woman of peace who never stopped working toward a future of racial equality.

"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, an Illinois Democrat. "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."

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.

Members of Congress and national civil rights leaders filled the pews. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke, as did former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat; Ford Motor Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Bill Ford; and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat.

After the funeral, Parks' casket was taken to Woodlawn Cemetery, where she was entombed in a mausoleum with the bodies of her husband and mother.