Washington ? Linking hands and singing “We Shall Overcome,” old friends and Washington’s establishment remembered Rosa Parks on Monday as a quiet, gentle woman whose courage in the face of segregation helped inspire generations.

An overflow church crowd paid tribute to the woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus 50 years ago helped galvanize the modern civil rights movement. The farewell and “homegoing” in Washington also attracted tens of thousands who stood for hours for a glimpse of Parks’ mahogany coffin in the Capitol Rotunda.

In a three-hour memorial service at historic Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, Parks was celebrated by political, religious and civil rights leaders and other luminaries who spoke of the example she set with a simple act of defiance.

“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. “I know that.”

Winfrey, who was born in Mississippi during segregation, said Parks’ stand “changed the trajectory of my life and the lives of so many other people in the world.”

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., said Parks’ refusal to give up her seat “was the functional equivalent of a nonviolent shot heard round the world.”

TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey pays tribute to Rosa Parks during a memorial service on Monday in the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington.

“She saw the inherent evil in segregation and she had the courage to fight it in its common place, a seat on a bus,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

At the end of the service, the audience joined hands and sang the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.”

Afterward, Parks’ casket was flown to Detroit, where a viewing began late Monday at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

Parks, who died last Monday at 92, was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man on demand, as required by law at the time.

Capitol Police estimated the crowd at more than 30,000 but some participants said it was far bigger.

Bush, who presented a wreath Sunday night at a Capitol Hill ceremony, ordered the U.S. flag flown at half-staff over all public buildings Wednesday, the day of Parks’ funeral in Detroit.