Obama, the sole African-American member in the United States Senate, had also been invited to speak. On the street, a marine played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, and the congregants sang “She Would Not Be Moved.” Bill Clinton reminisced about riding segregated buses in Jim Crow Arkansas-and then feeling the liberating effect of Parks’s act. “Everyone was there!” Jesse Jackson, the Clintons, Al Sharpton, Aretha Franklin, and a phalanx of preachers all paid tribute to Parks. Jakes, the pastor of the Potter’s House, a Dallas church of thirty thousand congregants, said. “That funeral was so long that I can hardly remember it!” Bishop T. Thousands lined the streets to wave farewell and sing the old anthems and hymns. Then, on November 2nd, in Detroit, there was a funeral service at the Greater Grace Temple Church. For two days, her body lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda, in Washington-an honor accorded only twenty-nine times before. Her signal act of defiance on the evening of December 1, 1955, her refusal to vacate her seat near the front of the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama-what Martin Luther King, Jr., called the ultimate gesture of “I can take it no longer”-was the precipitating act of the city’s bus boycott and the civil-rights movement. In October, 2005, two months after Hurricane Katrina, Rosa Parks died, at the age of ninety-two, in Detroit.

Rosa parks funeral