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 lavish 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 of them had accomplished great things in their lives, things they knew might have be impossible if, 50 years ago, a tailor's assistant 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 hadn't been born when Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in 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 during 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, 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."
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.
Philip Robert Cousin, a senior bishop of the AME Church, eulogized Parks as "a diamond that had been polished in the hands of God. ... She formed the rock on which we now stand."
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 took her famous stand in 1955; to Washington, where she became the first woman to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
Singers Wednesday included Aretha Franklin and mezzo-soprano Brenda Jackson, who sang a soaring version of the Lord's Prayer.
Members of Congress, national civil rights leaders filled the pews. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke, as did former presidential candidate John Kerry, Ford Motor Co. Chairman and CEO Bill Ford and U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
"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.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson likened Parks to an eagle.
"You allowed the rebirth of hope," he said, after calling for a White House conference on civil rights. "You gave us confident protection. You showed us how to fly."
Long before the funeral, the line to get one of the 2,000 available public seats at the church extended for blocks.
Tammi Swanigan waited for hours without getting a seat, but the 28-year-old Detroit resident wasn't complaining.
"I think just being here, it was really nice to see all the people come out to pay their respects," she said.
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.
Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957, after they lost their jobs and faced harassment and death threats in Montgomery.
After the funeral, Parks' casket was put on an antique gold-trimmed black wooden horse-drawn carriage for the seven-mile procession to Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery, where she was to be entombed in a mausoleum along with the bodies of her husband and mother.
But because of the late hour, the casket was removed from the carriage about a block into the trip and placed in a white antique hearse for the rest of the journey.
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Associated Press Writers JoAnne Viviano and Tom Krisher contributed to this report.
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