Every living former president was present or represented at the Thursday funeral of the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, …
Every living former president was present or represented at the Thursday funeral of the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, capping off a week of tributes to the late civil rights icon. Each of the former leaders spoke about Lewis’s lifelong dedication to civil rights, equality and the ways in which Americans could honor the late lawmaker during a time when racial injustice continues to be at the forefront of national debate. Lewis died July 18 at the age of 80, months after he announced that he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and was undergoing treatment. Former President Barack Obama (D) called for concrete policy changes as a way of honoring Lewis’s legacy. The former president called for the passage of a bill restoring a provision of the Voting Rights Act. «If politicians want to honor John…there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero,” Obama said. “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.» Before his storied career as a Georgia congressman, Lewis engaged in civil rights activism by organizing sit-ins at local diners in Tennessee while he was a student at Fisk University. In 1961, Lewis was also part of the Freedom Riders, protesting segregation on busses and refusing to leave seats that were designated for white patrons. During these protests, he faced angry mobs, fire bombs and violence from the Ku Klux Klan. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis told CNN while reflecting on the Freedom Rides 40 years later. In 1965, Lewis was brutally beaten when he led the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Ala. Shortly afterward, outrage from the scenes at the bridge prompted lawmakers to pass the landmark Voting Rights Act.
