“When we do form a more perfect union… John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday.
On Thursday afternoon, Representative John Lewis was laid to rest in Atlanta, where he lived and served as a member of Congress for more than three decades.
Three living presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — were in attendance to honor the life of one of the nation’s most prolific civil rights figures. But it was the eulogy of Mr. Obama, the first Black president of the United States, that may never have happened were it not for the work of Lewis himself.
“I’ve come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom,” Mr. Obama told the emotional crowd at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.
Indeed, Mr. Obama told Lewis as much after he was sworn in at his first inauguration in 2009, when Lewis asked for Mr. Obama’s signature. “Because of you, John,” Mr. Obama wrote on the congressman’s program.
Lewis may not have imagined he’d even live to see that day, as he was beaten and nearly killed while leading a peaceful march for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7,1965. America watched the violence in horror, and eight days later the Voting Rights Act was passed ensuring Black people had the right to vote.
Mr. Obama spoke of that fateful day, and Lewis’ legacy of leadership, on Thursday. “John Lewis, first of the Freedom Riders, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, youngest speaker at the March on Washington, leader of the march from Selma to Montgomery, member of Congress,” he said. “He not only embraced that responsibility, but he made it his life’s work.”
It was that lifelong fight for the right to vote that Mr. Obama encouraged America to continue, as he highlighted threats to voting access and an unprecedented demand for mail-in voting in the upcoming November election.
