Thousands mourn Rosa Parks

MONTGOMERY, Alabama - Thousands of mourners streamed past the open coffin of civil rights icon Rosa Parks in the city where her refusal 50 years ago to give up her bus seat to a white man helped lead to desegregation in America.

The casket of Parks, who died in Detroit last Monday at the age of 92, was draped in lace and her body was dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess as she lay at the altar of the St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery. Her coffin was taken to the church in a horse-drawn carriage.

"I admired Rosa Parks since I was a small child and this is my last chance to thank her," said teenager Dyshay Scott, who traveled to Montgomery with her grandparents from their home in South Carolina.

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress for a Montgomery department store when she caught a bus in downtown Montgomery on December 1, 1955.

Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man who boarded the bus three stops after her led to her arrest. But it also sparked a boycott of the Montgomery bus system by black residents led by a then-unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and legal challenges led to a US Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and helped put an end to "Jim Crow" laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities throughout the South.

Mourners lined up around the block outside the church in Montgomery on Saturday. Some wept as they passed the casket.

Parks' body was to be on display until midnight. A service will be held on Sunday morning and her coffin will then be flown to Washington where she will become the first woman to lie in honor in the US Capitol Rotunda, a tribute usually reserved for presidents, soldiers and politicians.

Her funeral is scheduled to take place in Detroit on Wednesday.

Colorblind

Becky Hyatt, a white woman from Blountsville in north Alabama, said that when she was about 10 years old in a small town in Georgia, she was spanked for playing with a little black girl.

"I just felt I had to be here, as a child of the '50s and '60s. It's maybe my way of making amends," she said.

Joyce Huffman, of Montgomery, and several other mourners said Parks' legacy was to turn them blind to skin color.

"I'm colorblind. You don't get any blessing from hating people. If more people were colorblind there would be more peace," she said.

Actress Cicely Tyson, who played Rosa Parks' mother in the movie "The Rosa Parks Story," and who came to Montgomery from California, said Rosa Parks had been in her life as long as she could remember.

"We shouldn't be colorblind but should accept each other as human beings. To be colorblind is to be discarding," she said.

- REUTERS