US bids farewell to civil rights icon Rosa Parks

Former United States President Bill Clinton speaks during the funeral of Rosa Parks in Detroit, Michigan. Picture / Reuters

DETROIT - Thousands of mourners, some waiting for hours in the cold, paid a final tribute on Wednesday to Rosa Parks, who galvanized the United States (US) civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South a half a century ago.

Former President Bill Clinton said her refusal to yield her seat on the bus "ignited the most significant social movement in American history."

Parks, who died on October 24 at age 92, was to be entombed later in a cemetery in Detroit, the city she adopted as her home town not long after her 1955 arrest in Montgomery, Alabama.

Clinton recounted how he remembered Parks' historic act of disobedience when he was a nine-year-old boy riding a segregated bus to school every day in Arkansas.

The next day, he said, he and two friends decided to pay tribute to Parks by sitting in the back of their bus.

"She did help to set us all free," he said.

After her arrest, Parks was convicted of breaking the law and fined US$10, ($14.60) along with US$4 in court costs. That same day, black residents began a boycott of the bus system that lasted for 381 days, led by a then-unknown Reverend Martin Luther King.

Legal challenges led to a Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and ultimately helped put an end to laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities across the South.

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the only black in the US Senate, said Parks "held no public office, she wasn't a wealthy woman, didn't appear in the society pages, she did not have an advanced degree (but) when the history of this country is written ... it is this small quiet woman whose name will be remembered."

Bishop Charles Ellis, pastor of the Greater Grace Temple where Wednesday's funeral was held, called the diminutive Parks "a gentle giant of a woman." Her funeral, he said, was a "national victory celebration ... because she humbled herself in life God has highly exalted her in eternity."

The seat waiting for her in heaven, Ellis said, was reserved for her 50 years ago in Alabama.

The service continued for more than five hours inside the 4,000-seat church, a US$33 million facility opened just a few years ago by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation.

Aretha Franklin, the "queen of soul," offered a moving arrangement of The Impossible Dream."

Some waited for hours in a predawn chill to get into the church where they were joined by such figures as the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Senator John Kerry, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Clinton's wife Hillary, the Democratic senator from New York, and Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam.

The service, punctuated by Gospel hymns from two choirs that sent the congregation swaying, followed tributes to Parks across the country.

Her body was placed in the United States (US) Capitol Rotunda last Sunday, the first such honour ever accorded a woman. There was also a service in Alabama.

The Reverend Bernice King, daughter of the civil rights leader, told the service she came on behalf of her mother, Coretta Scott King, who recently suffered a stroke.

Parks, she said, "was the catalyst of one of the most important freedom movements not only in American history but in world history .. indeed she became the symbol and personification of our nonviolent struggle for liberation and human dignity."

- REUTERS