Former President Barack Obama spoke during the funeral service for Rep. John Lewis in Atlanta on Thursday.
Photo: alyssa pointer/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesWASHINGTON—Former President Barack Obama on Thursday heralded the late Rep. John Lewis as a “founding father” whose legacy of activism transformed American democracy, while warning that the nation must remain “vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history.”
Paying tribute to Mr. Lewis along with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was once a co-pastor, Mr. Obama said Mr. Lewis was perhaps Dr. King’s “finest disciple.”
“America was built by John Lewises,” he said. “When we do form a 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.”
The funeral service capped off a week of events honoring Mr. Lewis, a civil-rights icon and longtime Democratic lawmaker who died July 17 of pancreatic cancer at age 80.
Messrs. Bush, Clinton and other prominent speakers also paid tribute to Mr. Lewis’s role in ushering in a landmark voting-rights law and his decades of service in Congress. Mr. Lewis had represented an Atlanta-area district since 1987.
But it was Mr. Obama, the nation’s first Black president, who issued an explicit call to action by urging lawmakers to take up the cause championed by Mr. Lewis in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s—and suggesting Congress amend its rules to do so if necessary.
“You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “If all of 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.”
An increasing number of Democrats have called for the Senate to abolish the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to end debate on most legislation, calling it an obstacle to important bills. Defenders of the tool say it plays a vital role in the legislative process, distinguishing the Senate from the House by forcing the majority to compromise with the minority.
Mr. Obama spent the earlier part of his eulogy recalling how a young Mr. Lewis was beaten and arrested in the pursuit of securing the right to vote. Reflecting on the electoral landscape today, Mr. Obama denounced what he said were ongoing voter suppression tactics targeting Black and Hispanic voters, as well as young people.
Mr. Obama appeared to allude to President Trump by criticizing the U.S. government’s response to the protests against police brutality that stemmed from the late May killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness, with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans,” Mr. Obama said. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Obama’s remarks.
Speaking on Thursday, Mr. Bush said Mr. Lewis “believed in humanity and he believed in America.”
“We live in a better and nobler country today 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,” Mr. Bush said.
Remembering Mr. Lewis as “a friend who would walk the stony road that he asked you to walk, that would brave the chastening rods he asked you to be whipped by,” Mr. Clinton saluted the late Congressman as someone who had an “uncanny ability to heal troubled waters.”
“When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead,” Mr. Clinton said. “He thought the opened hand was better than a clenched fist.”
‘When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead,’ former President Bill Clinton said of the late Rep. John Lewis at the funeral service on Thursday.
Photo: Alyssa Pointer/Associated PressThe celebration of Mr. Lewis began with a memorial service in Troy, Ala., on Saturday. His body was then carried across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where in 1965 he was beaten by police while helping to lead the march for voting rights.
Former President George W. Bush speaks during the funeral service for the late Rep. John Lewis at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Thursday.
Photo: alyssa pointer/ShutterstockThe commemoration of Mr. Lewis’s life continued in Washington, D.C., where he became the first black lawmaker to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Members of Congress paid tribute to Mr. Lewis’s decades of public service at an invitation-only ceremony on Tuesday, which brought together dozens of lawmakers from across the political spectrum.
Raised in the segregated South, Mr. Lewis was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington and worked alongside Dr. King at the height of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s.
One of Dr. King’s daughters, the Rev. Bernice King, led the congregation in prayer. She called on Congress to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
“Let a double portion of what John Lewis’ life was about fall upon us, in this hour, so that we can continue to get into good trouble,” she said.
People watch on a large screen outside the funeral service for civil-rights leader and Democratic Representative from Georgia John Lewis in Atlanta, Thursday.
Photo: chris aluka berry/ShutterstockMr. Lewis famously urged the American public to get into “good trouble.”
He delivered a final message to young people in a column written shortly before his death and published by the New York Times on the day of his funeral. In it, Mr. Lewis wrote of being “inspired” in the final days of his life by the nationwide protests for racial justice following the late May killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
“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,“ Mr. Lewis wrote. ”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.”
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