Latest: 100s Line Up To Pay Respects To The Queen, Charles H. Wright Museum Hosts Public Viewing
DETROIT (AP) — The Latest on the first day of a public viewing of Aretha Franklin at the Charles H. Wright museum.
7:30 a.m.
Hundreds of people are lining up to pay their final respects to Aretha Franklin.
Fans outside Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History have been talking about their memories of the Queen of Soul as they wait before dawn Tuesday for the start of public viewing. Occasionally the crowd bursts into song.
Many of those in line are from Detroit, but others traveled from as far as Las Vegas and Miami.
Paula Marie Seniors says the setting for the public viewings Tuesday and Wednesday couldn't be more fitting. The associate professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech says Franklin is "being honored almost like a queen at one of the most important black museums in the United States."
Franklin died Aug. 16 at age 76 of pancreatic cancer.
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12 a.m.
Thousands are expected to pour into Detroit's Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History on Tuesday and Wednesday to pay their final respects to Aretha Franklin.
Paula Marie Seniors says the setting for the public viewings Tuesday and Wednesday couldn't be more fitting. The associate professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech says Franklin is "being honored almost like a queen at one of the most important black museums in the United States."
Seniors says the Queen of Soul was "a singer of the universe." Yet she added Franklin, who died at age 76 on Aug. 16 of pancreatic cancer, also was "so unapologetically black" and "so proud of being a black woman."
To be sure, Franklin didn't consider herself a catalyst for the women's movement or on the front lines of the fight for civil rights. But she represented and pushed for both in ways big and small — none, perhaps, more prominently or simultaneously as her mold-breaking take on the Otis Redding song, "Respect." She later said that with her interpretation — which even Redding acknowledged became the standard — sought to convey a message about the need to respect women, people of color, children and all people.
The museum, which had been the largest black museum in the U.S. until the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington, D.C., in 2016, also hosted similar viewings for civil rights icon Rosa Parks after her 2005 death. In further symbolic symmetry, Franklin sang at Parks' funeral, which was held at the same Detroit church as Franklin's, and the singer will be entombed in the same cemetery as Parks.
The women came to their activism from different places and used different techniques, but "in the long run, they were both fighting for the same cause, which is freedom," Seniors said.
Seniors said if she could attend the viewings, she would bring her 8-year-old daughter, Shakeila, who has sung along with Franklin's videos.
"I want my daughter to know anything and everything about African-American culture and history," said Seniors, whose father, Clarence Henry Seniors, was roommates at Morehouse College with Franklin's brother, Cecil. "I would want my daughter to know of the people like Aretha Franklin — to be able to listen to that voice ... and hear that there is something special about it."
The museum hosted a similar viewing for civil rights icon Rosa Parks after her 2005 death.
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