Friends Bid Farewell to Activist Snyder : Homeless: Thousands, celebrities and unknown, pack the services. He is eulogized as a ‘giant . . . voice for social justice.’

Cher stood on the flower-filled podium and lauded him for finding beauty in people whom others had “written off.” Martin Sheen called him a “giant, uncompromising and compassionate voice for social justice.”

But by and large, Tuesday’s farewell to homeless-advocate Mitch Snyder was more like a political rally than a solemn funeral service. The tone was appropriate, said many of the rich and poor, famous and unknown, who gathered by the thousands to remember Snyder, filling a park across from the Federal City Shelter that Snyder helped create in downtown Washington.

“I don’t think you can separate the politics from the man when it comes to Mitch Snyder,” said Hilda Nikkel, a Mennonite from Canada who took time off from work to “pay tribute to a pretty great man.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who officiated, praised Snyder but insisted that the best eulogy was to continue his work.

“As he ascends to glory,” said Jackson, “he leaves us here to tell the story that America’s dream is incomplete, that the Liberty Bell has a crack in it until the homeless are housed and the hungry are fed.”

Snyder was found dead in his room at the shelter last Thursday in an apparent suicide. A note found with the body indicated that Snyder was despondent over problems in his personal life.

Carol Fennelly, his long-time companion and fiancee, said that during several of Snyder’s hunger strikes he told her what he wanted his funeral to be like. “There were specific people that he requested speak at his funeral,” she said.

So as mourners wiped eyes damp with sorrow and brows damp with sweat on a hot day, a string of the celebrities and supporters he had mentioned stepped up to a clutch of microphones arrayed above Snyder’s plain pine coffin.

Sheen, who portrayed Snyder in a television movie, said that “it is not possible to comprehend Mitch’s passing any more than it is possible to comprehend the very great and wondrous mystery of his life.”

In fulfilling his call to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless,” Sheen continued, Snyder “confronted the wrath of both church and state as well as a troubled nation’s conscience.”

“Mitch ministered to the unacceptable, and so he himself was sometimes considered unacceptable,” said Karen Saunders, an official at the women’s shelter Snyder helped run.

Dick Gregory, the comedian, was one of the few who alluded to Snyder’s cause of death. “Mitch was a soldier,” he said, “and soldiers wear down when they are on the front lines.

“I don’t know what was in that darn (suicide) note,” he said, turning to Fennelly, “but don’t let him blame it on you.”

Washington Mayor Marion Barry, taking a break from his trial on drug and perjury charges, also spoke. Snyder believed, Barry said, that “whether you are addicted or not addicted, you are still a human being in God’s eyesight.”

As the ceremony continued, a sticky drizzle turned into heavy sunshine, forcing mourners to use their umbrellas first for shelter, then for shade.

Phillip Berrigan, the radical priest who met Snyder while both were serving time in prison, called Snyder a “true shepherd” who fought against “the false shepherds of church and state.”

One of Snyder’s sons, Dean, sat on the podium with others who participated in the ceremony. Snyder had separated from his wife and two sons in 1969.

After the service at the shelter, speakers and mourners marched down Pennsylvania Avenue behind Snyder’s coffin, encased in an elegant horse-drawn hearse.

They stopped at the city’s main administration building where they demonstrated for greater support for the homeless.

One of the marchers, Iva Joyce Spencer Vaughn, said that she first met Snyder in the 1960s anti-war movement and remembered him having said that “if no one followed his casket at the end of his life then he would have failed.” ’

‘Well,” she said, making a broad sweep at the procession with her arm, “you can see for yourself.”