More than 100 pink Cadillacs take part in Franklin funeral
About 130 pink Cadillacs lined Detroit’s Seven Mile Road near the Greater Grace Temple where a funeral service was being conducted for the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, on Aug. 31.
Mixed in with the dozens of finned classic Eldorados and Coupe de Villes were rows and rows of newer Cadillac SUVs, which were petitioned to show up by Crisette Ellis, the church’s first lady and a sales director for Mary Kay.
The cosmetics company famously gives its top consultants pink Cadillacs, which, along with a lyric about pink Cadillacs in Franklin’s 1985 hit Freeway of Love, is what sparked the idea in the mind of Ellis’s husband, a Detroit pastor.
Ellis ran with her husband’s idea and reached out to associates to bring their pink Cadillacs to the funeral.
“They’re coming from everywhere,” she told National Public Radio. “They are coming from as far as Texas, Omaha, Nebraska, Florida, North Carolina, Maryland.”
Franklin was raised in Detroit and after rising to fame as one of the most famous singers of all time, became an icon of the city. She is seen riding off in the passenger seat of a pink ’57 Eldorado at the end of the music video for Freeway of Love.
Her casket was carried to the funeral service in the back of a 1940 LaSalle hearse, a Cadillac-junior brand vehicle, which was also used to ferry the caskets of her father and of Rosa Parks.