DETROIT, MI (AP)-- 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 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."
The museum hosted a similar viewing for civil rights icon Rosa Parks after her 2005 death.