Thousands mourn US civil right icon Rosa Parks

An unidentified boy attends the lying in repose of Rosa Parks in Montgomery

Thousands of mourners streamed past the open coffin of civil rights icon Rosa Parks yesterday in the city where her refusal 50 years ago to give up her bus seat to a white man helped lead to desegregation in America.

The casket of Parks, who died in Detroit on Monday at the age of 92, was draped in lace and her body was dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess as she lay at the altar of the St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery. Her coffin was taken to the church in a horse-drawn carriage.

"I admired Rosa Parks since I was a small child and this is my last chance to thank her," said teenager Dyshay Scott, who travelled to Montgomery with her grandparents from their home in South Carolina.

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress for a Montgomery department store when she caught a bus in downtown Montgomery on December 1, 1955. Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man who boarded the bus three stops after her led to her arrest. But it also sparked a boycott of the Montgomery bus system by black residents led by a then-unknown Martin Luther King Jr.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and legal challenges led to a US Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and helped put an end to "Jim Crow" laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities throughout the south. - Reuters