Rosa Parks' funeral allows final tributes to civil rights leader

<p>Thousands of people prepared to honor civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks at her funeral Wednesday, after at least 60,000 paid tribute to Parks as she lay in honor in her native state of Alabama, the nation's capital and her adopted city of Detroit.</p><p>The service was to begin at 11 a.m. at Greater Grace Temple after her casket was moved from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Viewing at the museum was to last until 5 a.m. Tens of thousands had come to pay their respects in Detroit by Tuesday evening.</p><p>Among them was the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who called Parks "the mother of a new America." Jackson was to deliver the eulogy at Parks' funeral service.</p><p>Among those planning to attend the service were former President Clinton and his wife, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as well as Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, civil rights leaders and other dignitaries.</p><p>Aretha Franklin was to sing.</p><p>The church holds 4,000 people, even more than the Washington church where President Bush and wife Laura were among the attendees for Parks' memorial service. Two-thousand of Greater Grace Temple's seats were to be available to the public, and some people had lined up well before dawn to make sure they could get in.</p><p>Parks was 92 when she died Oct. 24 in Detroit. Fifty years earlier, she was a 42-year-old tailor's assistant at a department store in Montgomery, Ala., when she was arrested and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. Her action on Dec. 1, 1955 triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.</p><p>The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in December 1956 that segregated seats on city buses were unconstitutional, giving momentum to the battle against laws that separated the races in public accommodations and businesses throughout the South.</p><p>Parks' act exposed her and her husband Raymond to harassment and death threats, and they lost their jobs in Montgomery. They moved to Detroit with Rosa Parks' mother, Leona McCauley, in 1957.</p><p>Rosa Parks held a series of low-paying jobs before U.S. Rep. John Conyers hired her in 1965 to work in his Detroit office. She remained there until 1987.</p><p>Plans had originally called for Parks to be buried next to her husband and mother in a family plot in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery. But officials for the Swanson Funeral Home, which is handling the arrangements, confirmed Tuesday that Parks would be entombed in a mausoleum at the cemetery and that the bodies of her husband and mother would be moved there as well.</p><p>___</p><p>Associated Press Writer Bree Fowler contributed to this report.</p>

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