Rosa Parks' courage lauded at service

WASHINGTON — Linking hands and singing "We Shall Overcome," old friends and Washington's establishment remembered Rosa Parks on Monday.

An overflow crowd at a three-hour memorial service at historic Metropolitan A.M.E. Church paid tribute to the woman whose refusal in 1955 to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus helped to galvanize the modern civil-rights movement.

Tens of thousands stood for hours for a glimpse of Parks' mahogany coffin in the Capitol Rotunda Sunday and Monday.

"I would not be standing here today, nor standing where I stand every day, had she not chosen to sit down," said talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, who was born in Mississippi during segregation. "I know that."

Afterward, Parks' casket was flown to Detroit, for a viewing at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.