By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Her star-studded funeral was as big and boisterous as civil rights icon Rosa Parks was diminutive and reserved, packing one of Detroit's largest churches with a president, powerful preaching, passionate prayer and soulful singing for a staggering seven hours.
The so-called National Victory Celebration at Greater Grace Temple on Detroit's west side, which could almost fit all of Dowagiac inside, was witnessed Wednesday by an orange-shirted group from the Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks program at the middle school - KCP for short.
For these seventh and eighth graders who were babies or not yet born when Parks spoke at Conner-Mayo AME Church on N. Front Street in July 1993, it was a tremendous opportunity to witness history that will probably be appreciated even more in years to come - although it's pretty cool now.
They left Stanley's house at about 3:30 a.m., but it was closer to 5 when all the students had been rounded up. They arrived to find roads closed off and parking hard to come by. “We just happened to go down through the maze, trying to found an opening, and we ended up parking rightin front of the church. There were people outside who were never able to get in.”
An estimated 4,000 mourners, including a bipartisan U.S. House delegation led by Cass County's congressman, Rep. Fred Upton, joined President Bill Clinton, Aretha Franklin (who sang “I'll Fly Away”), Sen. John Kerry,
Upton met Parks in 1999 when she was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, a Congressional Gold Medal, for refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. 1, 1955 - before Detroit Mayor Kwame Kirkpatrick was born, though he attributed his success to her opening of doors.
She “held no public office, she wasn't a wealthy woman, didn't appear in the society pages,” said U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the oratorical star of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “Yet when the history of the 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.”
Parks' coffin went from Detroit, where she lived since 1957, to Montgomery, where her dignified act of defiance in not yielding her seat to a white man sparked the civil rights movement to Washington, where she became the first woman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.
The first hour of the service was devoted to audience members holding hands and singing the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome,” as her family filed past her casket. Her longtime friend, Johnnie Carr, 94, of Montgomery, attended the memorial.
Speakers variously described her as a warrior and a peaceful woman who worked tirelessly for racial equality.
Clinton, who awarded Parks the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, said her “single, simple act of dignity and courage struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry.”
Clinton, as a 9-year-old boy in Arkansas, quit sitting in the front of segregated buses to show solidarity with Parks.
Her eulogy called her a “diamond that had been polished in the hands of God.”
Gov.. Jennifer Granholm called Parks “an improbable warrior who was leading an unlikely army of waitresses and street sweepers and shopkeepers and auto mechanics.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, likening Parks to an eagle, said she let “the rebirth of hope. You gave us confident protection. You showed us how to fly.” He called for a White House civil rights conference.
Speakers also included Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Kerry, Ford Motor Co. Chairman and CEO Bill Ford and U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-.N.Y.
Perhaps Dowagiac student's favorite speaker, since he also pops up in movies and on “Saturday Night Live,” was the Rev. Al Sharpton.
The Rev. Sharpton chided his audience about their political inactivity, even though they have such technological advances as e-mail and cell phones that weren't available in the era of the 381-day bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then 26. “And you can't even get a block association meeting together!”
Afterward, her casket was placed on an antique, gold-trimmed black wooden horse-drawn carriage, then transferred to a white antique hearse for a seven-mile procession to Woodlawn Cemetery, where she was to be entombed in a mausoleum along with the bodies of her husband Raymond, a barber who died in 1977, and mother.