Rosa Parks to be first woman to ‘lie in honour’

ROSA PARKS, the seamstress whose act of defiance on a public bus a half-century ago helped spark the US civil rights movement, will join presidents and war heroes who have been honoured in death with a public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda.

Ms Parks, who died on Monday in Detroit at age 92, also will be the first woman to lie in honour in the Rotunda, the vast circular room under the Capitol dome in Washington.

The House of Representatives yesterday passed by voice vote a resolution allowing Ms Parks to be honoured in the Capitol tomorrow and Monday “so that the citizens of the United States may pay their last respects to this great American.”

It will be only the fifth time in the past two decades that a person has either lain in honour or in state in the Rotunda. The last to lie in state was Ronald Reagan after his death in June last year.

Ms Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 led to a 381-day boycott of the city’s bus system and helped ignite the modern civil rights movement.

“The movement that Rosa Parks helped launch changed not only our country, but the entire world, as her actions gave hope to every individual fighting for civil and human rights,” said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada.

“We now can honour her in a way deserving of her contributions and legacy.”

Ms Parks would be the first woman and second black American to receive the accolade. Jacob J. Chestnut, one of two Capitol police officers fatally shot in 1998, was the first black American to lie in honour.

Officials in Detroit and Montgomery said the first seats of their buses would be reserved as a tribute to Ms Parks’s legacy until her funeral next week. Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick put a black ribbon on Thursday on the first passenger seat of one of 200 buses.