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John Lewis Funeral Updates: Obama Praises a Man of ‘Unbreakable Perseverance’
John Lewis, a Man of ‘Unbreakable Perseverance,’ Is Laid to Rest
(about 3 hours later)
The funeral of John Lewis, a giant of Congress and the civil rights era, drew three former American presidents and hundreds of mourners on Thursday to Ebenezer Baptist Church, the sanctuary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on a sweltering day in Atlanta, his longtime adopted hometown.
ATLANTA — Three former presidents and dozens of other dignitaries were drawn to Ebenezer Baptist Church on Thursday to bid farewell to John Lewis, a giant of Congress and the civil rights era whose courageous protests guaranteed him a place in American history. But even as the funeral looked back over Mr. Lewis’s long life, it also focused very much on the tumultuous state of affairs in the country today.
In a eulogy, former President Barack Obama praised Mr. Lewis as an “American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance.”
The most pointed eulogy came from former President Barack Obama, who issued a blistering critique of the Trump administration, the brutality of police officers toward Black people and efforts to limit the right to vote that Mr. Lewis had shed his blood to secure.
Mr. Obama said he “owed a great debt” to Mr. Lewis.
The political tone of the ceremony came as little surprise. Mr. Lewis, who died July 17 at the age of 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, had spent more than three decades in Congress as a thorn in the side of Republican administrations. And he and President Trump had traded public slights since before Mr. Trump took office.
“We’re born with instructions to form a more perfect union,” the former president said. “Explicit in those words is the idea that we’re imperfect. That what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than any might have thought possible.”
Mr. Obama compared Mr. Lewis to an Old Testament prophet and credited him with directly paving the way for the nation’s first Black president. He also took aim at the forces that he said were working against the equality for Black Americans and other oppressed people that Mr. Lewis had spent a lifetime championing.
[Read the transcript of President Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis]
“Bull Connor may be gone,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the 1960s-era public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., who turned fire hoses and dogs on civil rights protesters. “But today, we witness, with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans.”
Mr. Obama asked those present to imagine the courage of a 20-year-old Mr. Lewis as he tried to “challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression” by riding up front on a segregated bus in the South.
George Wallace, the Alabama governor who endorsed segregation and used racist language, may also be gone, Mr. Obama continued. “But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
“America was built by John Lewises,” Mr. Obama said. “He as much as anyone in our history brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideas. And someday when we do finish that long journey toward freedom, when we do form a more perfect union, whether it’s years from now or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries, John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.”
And while insuperable poll tests for Black people may be a thing of the past, Mr. Obama said, “Even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”
On a day when President Trump tweeted about delaying the November election, which he does not have the power to do, Mr. Obama also said America’s electoral system was under attack. He decried efforts to close polling stations and undermine the Postal Service in the lead-up to an election in which voting by mail may be crucial because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The critique elicited a torrent of applause from the invitation-only audience at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the famed institution that Mr. Lewis attended and where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Lewis’s mentor and ally, once preached.
Mr. Obama called for an expansion of the Voting Rights Act that would restore voting rights to felons, make Election Day a public holiday, open more polling stations and provide full congressional representation to residents of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
The mourners, masked to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, were strategically limited in number to ensure social distancing. Some took their seats as an organist played “We Shall Overcome,” a protest anthem sung by Mr. Lewis countless times during his nonviolent confrontations with segregationist forces in the South who beat and injured him on several occasions.
“If all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the procedural rule in the U.S. Senate that requires 60 votes to allow most legislation to pass.
Mr. Obama praised Mr. Lewis in his eulogy as an “American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance.”
In death, Mr. Lewis drew a bipartisan crowd, including former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, although Mr. Trump did not attend. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and dozens of members of Congress were also at the three-hour service, presided over by Ebenezer’s pastor, the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, who is running as a Democrat for a Senate seat.
Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton shared personal memories of working alongside Mr. Lewis in Washington and the lessons he taught them and the nation.
Mr. Bush gave a short, warm speech in which he praised Mr. Lewis’s Christian faith and recalled working with him to establish the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
“We live in a better and nobler country today,” Mr. Bush said, “because of John Lewis — and his abiding faith in the power of God, in the power of democracy, and in the power of love to lift us all to a higher ground.”
“Listen, John and I had our disagreements, of course,” said Mr. Bush, a Republican. “But in the America John Lewis fought for, and the America I believe in, differences of opinion are inevitable elements and evidence of democracy in action.”
“In the America John Lewis fought for, and the America I believe in, differences of opinion are inevitable elements and evidence of democracy in action,” he said. “We the people, including congressmen and presidents, can have differing views on how to perfect our union while sharing the conviction that our nation however flawed is at heart a good and noble one.”
The line was as well received as Mr. Bush himself: Dr. Warnock noted that Mr. Bush was president “the last time we reauthorized the Voting Rights Act.” It was a markedly different tone from the 2006 funeral of Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s widow, in which numerous speakers criticized the Bush administration while Mr. Bush, then in his second term, looked on.
Mr. Clinton praised Mr. Lewis’s enduring efforts over many decades.
Mr. Clinton called Mr. Lewis “a man I loved for a long time” and someone who was “on a mission that was bigger than personal ambition.”
“John Lewis was a walking rebuke to people who thought, ‘Well we ain’t there yet, we’ve been working a long time, isn’t it time to bag it?’ He kept moving. He hoped for, and imagined, and lived and worked and moved for his beloved community.”
He also said that Mr. Lewis had learned a lesson after he was asked by other civil rights leaders to tone down a fiery speech that he had written for the March on Washington in August 1963. “He listened to people that he knew had the same goals say, ‘Well, we have to be careful how we say this because we’re trying to get converts, not more adversaries.’”
“He got into a lot of good trouble along the way, but let’s not forget he also developed an absolutely uncanny ability to heal troubled waters,” Mr. Clinton said. “When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead. He thought the open hand was better than the clenched fist.”
It came as little surprise that Mr. Lewis’s funeral would dwell as much on the present as on his younger days, including his beating in 1965 by Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., an atrocity that helped spur Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. On Thursday, The New York Times, at Mr. Lewis’s request, published an essay he wrote that praised the Black Lives Matter movement and urged continued participation in the democratic process.
“I think it’s important that all of us who loved him remember that he was, after all, a human being,” he said. “A man like all other humans, born with strengths that he made the most of when many don’t. Born with weaknesses that he worked hard to beat down when many can’t. But still a person. It made him more interesting, and it made him in my mind even greater.”
Mr. Lewis’s funeral also came amid a fraught season in Atlanta, which he represented as part of his Fifth Congressional District. In recent weeks, the city has been rocked by protests, both peaceful and violent, over systemic racism and police brutality.
Others in the crowd included Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey; the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who also gave remarks; and Atlanta’s mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms.
His coffin was carried into the sanctuary not long after Mr. Trump made unsubstantiated assertions of potential vote-by-mail fraud and floated the idea of postponing the election this November — a suggestion that shocked both critics and allies and heightened concerns that he might not accept the results if he were to lose.
At the same time, however, the funeral underscored how Mr. Lewis believed that his decades-long civil rights fight could be waged in a spirit of comity — and with a belief that the American project was not fatally flawed, but perfectible in the hands of a citizenry willing to go to the polls and engage in nonviolent protest.
A number of speakers encouraged people to use their right to vote, a right Mr. Lewis fought to protect.
The need to form coalitions with converts to the civil rights cause, including white people, was a cornerstone of Mr. Lewis’s belief system, and it clashed in the mid-1960s with a more radical branch of the movement that was skeptical of nonviolence as an effective strategy and prioritized Black political and economic power over integration.
“If you truly want to honor this humble hero, make sure that you vote,” said Bill Campbell, a former mayor of Atlanta.
Stokely Carmichael, a proponent of this worldview who would later change his name to Kwame Ture, was chosen to replace Mr. Lewis in 1966 as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
“What you can do, and I want to advise you and admonish you, to really give meaning to the John we love: vote,” said Xernona Clayton, civil rights leader and broadcaster.
“There were two or three years there where the movement went a little bit too far toward Stokely,” Mr. Clinton said. “But in the end John Lewis prevailed.”
Jamila Thompson, a deputy chief of staff to Mr. Lewis, said one of his messages to those in his office was: “Always, always, always vote.”
That philosophical tension, however, continues to play out among African-Americans and the activists powering the current Black Lives Matter movement.
Speakers also recalled a gentle soul who encouraged those around him to care for the people they loved.
In his many years in public life, Mr. Lewis played crucial roles as a critic who stood — often literally — against government power, but also as one who worked within the system as a 33-year member of Congress.
Ms. Thompson described him as a boss who didn’t hire based on a résumé but on an applicant’s passions, and inspired staff members to stay with him for decades.
The encomiums were not all of a political nature. The ceremony, which began with a tolling of a bell for each of his 80 years, also featured warm remembrances from family and staff members. A number of speakers revived the story of how a young Mr. Lewis, who grew up on an impoverished farm near Troy, Ala., used to preach to his family’s chickens.
He “spent every waking moment paying it forward,” she said, an attribute that meant while he had time for everyone, he was often behind schedule. The staff learned to operate on “John Lewis time.”
Called to something bigger, he eventually met Dr. King, who famously nicknamed him “the boy from Troy.”
“No matter how hard we worked he always worked harder,” she said.
Xernona Clayton, a longtime civil rights advocate, humorously recalled her strong-armed and ultimately successful efforts to effect a love match between a young Mr. Lewis and his future wife, Lillian Miles Lewis, who died in 2013. Mr. Lewis, she said, seemed like a man who was going places, unlike “the bums” who had approached Lillian in the past.
In the same way that he always took a call from his wife or his son, she said, he would tell his staff to drop everything if they had a family emergencies. He was a part of their lives, in and out of the office, Ms. Thompson said.
In his eulogy, Mr. Obama, among other things, called on Congress to pass a new Voting Rights Act named for Mr. Lewis, for the end of gerrymandering and for the establishment of a national holiday on Election Day to make it easier for working people to get to the polls.
“He got all into our businesses and was there in spirit or in person for the big moments,” she said.
Echoing a favored theme, Mr. Obama also praised Mr. Lewis for understanding that it takes not only faith but hard work to improve the country and keep a healthy democracy on course.
In his opening remarks, the Rev. Raphael Warnock called on those present to consider Mr. Lewis’s legacy and commit to continuing his fight for democracy and justice.
Mr. Lewis exhibited, he said, “that most American of ideas — the idea that any of us ordinary people, without rank or wealth or title or fame, can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation and come together and challenge the status quo and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest ideals.”
“We are summoned here because we are in a moment when there are some in high office who are much better at division than vision, who cannot lead us, so they seek to divide us,” said Mr. Warnock, who is currently running for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
For that, he said, Mr. Lewis would come to be viewed as “a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.”
“At a moment when there is so much political cynicism and narcissism that masquerades as patriotism, here lies a true American patriot who risked his life and lived for the hope and the promise of democracy.”
The sentiment resonated with the crowd that had gathered outside the church. Many dashed over to get a look as Mr. Lewis’s coffin was carried out.
Mr. Lewis was called to the ministry as a teenager, Mr. Warnock said, and would preach to his family’s chickens. But as he grew up, he was called to other causes.
But Latasha Cosby-Woods stood off to the side with her hand raised in prayer. She prayed, she said, for unity and justice, and for a new younger generation of activists: “the John Lewises of the world,” she said, who might “go forth and make a difference.”
“As his life took shape, instead of preaching sermons, he became one. He became a living, walking sermon about truth-telling and justice-making in the Earth. He loved America until America learned how to love him back.”
Lucy Tompkins contributed reporting from New York.
Mr. Lewis’s homegoing at Ebenezer evokes decades of civil rights history. The bodies of Dr. King, a mentor and ally of Mr. Lewis, and Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, lie side-by-side over a reflecting pool across Auburn Avenue, a fabled street of Black commerce and culture known as “Sweet Auburn” that is also home to the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park.
Mr. Lewis was a member of the church, which last month hosted the funeral for Rayshard Brooks, a Black man fatally shot by a white police officer at an Atlanta fast-food restaurant.
They came carrying photographs of John Lewis as a fiery young activist and of John Lewis as an elder statesman. They waved American flags and wore T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Lewis’s motto of “good trouble.”
A crowd filled a plaza outside of Ebenezer Baptist Church, known as “America’s Freedom Church,” on Thursday outside Mr. Lewis’s funeral.
Pam Hooks, a literacy coach in alternative schools, flew in with her cousin from Brevard County, Fla. “History!” she said.
“There’s always so much negativity surrounding African Americans,” said Ms. Hooks, who is Black. “We came to be in the midst of positivity and a moment that will live in the minds of Americans for years and years.”
As a teacher, she said, by attending in the flesh, she could help better convey Mr. Lewis’s legacy to her students, a legacy she described as “not giving up, no matter what.”
After the service, the crowd dashed over to see as Mr. Lewis’s coffin was carried out of church.
But Latasha Cosby-Woods stood off to the side with her hand raised in prayer. She prayed for unity and for justice. She prayed for the elected officials who had been inside the church.
“I pray God will use them as a vessel,” she said, “so they can come together.”
She prayed, she said, for “the John Lewises of the world to go forth and make a difference.”
Ms. Cosby-Woods, who came from nearby Gwinnett County, pushed her granddaughter in a stroller; she’s only 4 months old. Still, it was important to be here so she could one day explain the significance of the moment.
“It’s the younger generation that has to pick up the mantle,” she said.
Oretha Pope Jr. drove through the night from St. Petersburg, Fla., to return to Ebenezer, where she had once been a regular worshiper.
“I felt the urgency,” she said. “I had to get in the car and drive.”
Sharon Wright-Jackson, who came from the suburbs of Dallas, said she had grown up in the 1960s and ’70s, witnessing the work done by Mr. Lewis’s generation. She said it was clear that there was work that still needed to be done, and she said President Obama’s comments, especially, underscored the importance of continuing it.
“He was saluting him and giving us a charge for action,” said Ms. Wright-Jackson, who works on social justice issues.
“There has to be a fresh crop of fighters, a fresh crop of foot soldiers,” she added. “Even if the general dies, the battle goes on.”
Following in the path of his mentor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis will be buried in South-View Cemetery outside Atlanta alongside generations of Black civil rights activists, scholars, musicians and pastors.
South-View was founded in 1886 by nine Black businessmen who sought to create a place where Southern Black families could bury their loved ones with dignity at a time when harsh backlash to Reconstruction in the form of violence and Jim Crow laws made that nearly impossible.
“Blacks had grown tired of the disrespect they were forced to endure in order to bury their family members and friends,” the cemetery’s website reads. “They had to enter cemeteries through back gates, and even wade through swamps to conduct funeral services.”
In its 134 year history, South-View has served as a burial site for many Americans who fought for civil rights and freedom, some alongside Mr. Lewis.
Dr. King and Dr. Benjamin Mays were both interred there before being moved to their current sites, and Julian Bond, who helped to establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that Mr. Lewis later became chairman of, is also buried there.
Over the last few days, the body of John Lewis has traveled the country, from his native Alabama to the halls of Washington, D.C., to a public viewing Wednesday in Atlanta, his longtime adopted hometown, where scores of mourners lined up on a sweltering afternoon to bid him goodbye.
A motorcade on Wednesday led Mr. Lewis on one final tour of Atlanta, the city he represented in Congress for more than three decades and a place he helped establish as the spiritual home of a nonviolent movement to protest racism.
But on this ultimate journey, the hearse carrying the body of the congressman and civil rights leader traversed a city that in recent weeks has been racked by turmoil. It drove down streets where scores of demonstrators have marched this summer to protest police violence, including the fatal shooting of Mr. Brooks.
Mr. Lewis’s death on July 17 came amid a moment of unrest across America, with the nation again wrestling with its troubled racial history. And in the days since, at memorial events in Alabama and Washington, one person after the next has invoked Mr. Lewis’s credo of getting into “good trouble.” As a young man — and for the rest of his life — he defined it as a moral call to rebel through nonviolent means against injustices, even if the consequences were perilous.
The conversations about Mr. Lewis’s legacy, with some of his colleagues calling him the “conscience of Congress,” have pushed many activists and others to consider how his message of nonviolent resistance has endured and evolved for a new generation carrying on the fight.
“It’s easy to go violence on violence,” David Parker, an Army veteran who works for a courier company, said on Wednesday as he stood in a long line at the Statehouse to bid Mr. Lewis farewell. “The hard part is peace.”
[Read more: Mourners said Mr. Lewis’s message of nonviolent resistance must live on.]
Mr. Lewis wrote an essay shortly before his death for The New York Times to publish on the day of his funeral. Here is an excerpt.
While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.
That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.
Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me.
Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.
[Read more about this essay and Mr. Lewis’s legacy from The Times’s editorial page editor, Kathleen Kingsbury.]
Richard Fausset, Rick Rojas and Lucy Tompkins contributed reporting.
