Barack Obama hailed John Lewis as a founding father of “a fuller, better” United States in a soaring eulogy on Thursday, while forcefully calling on Americans to stand up to the forces threatening a cause the late congressman was willing to die for: the right to vote.
From the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached, Obama traced the arch of Lewis’s life – a child born into the Jim Crow south, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, a leader of the civil rights marches in Selma, and a US congressman from Georgia – tying his legacy to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, a black man under the knee of a white police officer. He then drew a line from the racist leaders who opposed civil rights in the 1960s to the policies and ideologies embraced by Donald Trump.
“Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” Obama said, never mentioning his successor by name. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting.”
In perhaps his most explicitly political speech since leaving office, Obama assailed Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail, which Democratic officials have pushed to expand in light of the coronavirus pandemic. He called the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring a supermajority of the chamber to pass legislation, which Republicans used to block his agenda, “another Jim Crow relic”.
Singling out members of Congress who issued statements calling Lewis a “hero” but oppose legislation that would restore the protections afforded under the Voting Rights Act Lewis struggled for in the 1960s, a law then granted under Lyndon Johnson but since weakened by a supreme court ruling in 2013, Obama said: “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”
“Preach,” a voice rang out from the pews, where mourners sat apart in observation of safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic. All those attending the service wore masks.
Lewis was drawn to activism after discovering King’s sermons on the radio as a young man. Calling him perhaps King’s “finest disciple”, Obama remembered Lewis as the “boy from Troy” who grew to become a “man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance”. He said he considered Lewis a “mentor” and has said that helped pave the way for his rise to the presidency, the first black man to ever hold the office.
As president, Obama awarded Lewis the medal of freedom, the highest civilian honor.
More than half a century after Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a day remembered as Bloody Sunday, at the vanguard of the pivotal Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, the nation is again facing a reckoning over the persistence of racial inequality.
“We’re summoned here because in a moment when there are some in high office who are much better at division than vision, who cannot lead us so they speak to divide us,” said the Rev Raphael Warnock, a senior pastor at the church who presided over the funeral. “In 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 limb for the hope and the promise of democracy.”
Obama was one of three former presidents, along with George Bush and Bill Clinton, to deliver remarks. Jimmy Carter, the former president and a Georgia native, who is now too frail to travel, sent a written tribute that was read from the pulpit.
Notably absent was Trump, who refused to attend the services or pay respects to Lewis’s casket as it lay in state in the US Capitol Rotunda earlier in the week. He had clashed with Lewis, once accusing the civil rights leader of being “all talk, talk, talk – no action”.
Hours before the funeral began in Atlanta, Trump suggested delaying November’s presidential election, justifying the extraordinary idea by repeating the false allegations that widespread mail-in balloting will result in a “fraudulent” result. Trump cannot legally change the date, but the suggestion is part of an unprecedented effort by the president to undermine faith in the results of the election.
The service was celebratory, marked by songs, poems, prayers and several humorous anecdotes. But speaker after speaker commanded the nation to look to the future and continue the work he left unfinished.
“We do not need bipartisan politics to celebrate the life of John Lewis,” said the Rev James Lawson, an activist who taught Lewis the philosophy and practice of nonviolent resistance. “We need the constitution to come alive.”
Winning and protecting the right to vote was Lewis’s life’s work, a cause for which he was beaten and bloodied. He lived to see the Voting Rights Act, the landmark civil rights legislation introduced and signed into law in the months after Bloody Sunday in March 1965. But it was weakened by the supreme court in 2013 and a bill that would restore key protections of the law languishes in Congress.
Dr Bernice King, the CEO of the King Center and youngest child of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, implored Congress to pass that legislation, which was renamed in honor of Lewis this week. She also called for leaders to end the “school-to-prison pipeline” and combat wealth inequality.
Her voice reverberated through the church, as she echoed Lewis’s famous call for those struggling, using non-violent resistance against injustice to get into “good trouble”.
Bernice King said: “Grant us God, a double portion for anointing, to get into good trouble until black bodies are no longer a threat in this world and black lives have equitable representation, power and influence.”
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who served alongside Lewis in Congress for more than three decades, recalled a double rainbow, arching over the Capitol on Tuesday night as thousands of mourners wept and bowed their heads before Lewis’s casket.
“We always knew he worked on the side of the angels, and now he is with them,” she said, pausing occasionally to fight back tears.
Lewis, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, died on 17 July, aged 80.
Earlier on Thursday, the New York Times published an essay, written by Lewis in the days before his death, that expressed optimism about the future led by a new generation of civil rights activists that he witnessed in the final days of his life.
“Emmett Till was my George Floyd,” he wrote. “He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor.”
He urged Americans to get in “good trouble, necessary trouble” – a personal credo encouraging people to “stand up, speak up and speak out” against discrimination and injustice.
“The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society,” he wrote. “You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”
In a deeply personal tribute, Clinton invoked Lewis’s words.
“He’s gone up yonder and left us with marching orders,” Clinton said. “I suggest – since he’s close enough to God to keep his eye on the sparrow and us – we salute, suit up and march on.”