Detroit: Thousands of mourners, some of whom waited for hours in the cold, paid a final tribute on Wednesday to Rosa Parks, who galvanised the US civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South half a century ago.
Former President Bill Clinton said her simple act of civil disobedience in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama "ignited the most significant social movement in American history."
The casket carrying Parks, who died on October 24 at age 92, was placed in a horse-drawn hearse for a procession to a Detroit cemetery after a seven-hour church service.
Entombment in a mausoleum well after sunset was private.
Clinton recounted how he remembered Parks' historic act when he was a nine-year-old boy riding a segregated bus to school every day in Arkansas.
The next day, he said, he and two friends decided to pay tribute to Parks by sitting in the back of their bus.
"She did help to set us all free," he said.
After her arrest, Parks was convicted of breaking the law and fined $10, along with $4 in court costs.
That same day, black residents began a boycott of the bus system that lasted for 381 days, led by a then-unknown Rev Martin Luther King.
Legal challenges led to a Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and ultimately helped put an end to laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities across the South.
She left Montgomery and moved to Detroit not long after her arrest.
The Rev Jesse Jackson, one of the last to speak at the end of the joyous service, said the police who arrested Parks "had guns, she had a breast full of righteousness. ... Sister Rosa you are our eagle bird of hope. You allowed the rebirth of hope."
Sen Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat and the only black in the US Senate, said Parks "held no public office, she wasn't a wealthy woman, didn't appear in the society pages, she did not have an advanced degree (but) when the history of this country is written ... it is this small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered."
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