Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy
Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy, Former US president Barack Obama inspired a standing ovation with his soaring eulogy at the funeral on Thursday of civil rights icon John Lewis, hailing the late congressman as afounding father of “a fuller, better America” yet to be realized, while forcefully calling Americans to fight the Trump administration’s effort to undermine a cause he 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 – a legacy that extends to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of a black man under the knee of a white police officer.
Related: 'I loved John Lewis': how he and Robert Kennedy forged an iron bond
“Today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” Obama said, never mentioning his successor. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
“Preach,” a voice rang out from the pews, where mourners sat apart in observation of safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic.
In perhaps his most explicitly political speech since leaving office, Obama assailed Donald 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 sixties, 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.”
His remarks came hours after Trump suggested delaying the November 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 result so the election.
Calling out civil right opponents of the sixties, Obama said: “Bull Connor might be gone but today with our own eyes we witness police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans. George Wallace might be gone … but we can still witness the federal government sending federal agents against peaceful demonstrators … using … teargas.
“As we sit here there are people doing their darndest to stop people from voting … even undermining the postal service … I know this is a celebration of John’s life, there are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things” but to rising applause, Obama said he must speak on about division and injustice.
More than half a century after Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, in the vanguard of the pivotal Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, the nation is again facing a reckoning over the persistence of racial inequality.
Joining Obama at the funeral on Thursday was former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, who both delivered impassioned remarks.
The Rev Raphael Warnock, presiding over the funeral, read a letter from Jimmy Carter, the former president and a Georgia native, who is now too frail to travel.
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”.
Lewis, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, died on 17 July, aged 80.
“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, in a moment when there is so much political cynicism and narcissism that masquerades as pate time here lies a true American patriot who risked his life and limb for the hope and the promise of democracy,” said the Rev Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at the church.
Speakers recalled Lewis’s legacy but 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 the voting rights 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.
Obama called Lewis “perhaps” Martin Luther King Jr’s “greatest disciple”.
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.” Her voice reverberated through the church where her father once preached, as she echoed Lewis’s famous call for those struggling, using non-violent resistance against injustice to get into “good trouble”.
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.
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 in a deeply personal tribute. “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.”
Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy, Former US president Barack Obama inspired a standing ovation with his soaring eulogy at the funeral on Thursday of civil rights icon John Lewis, hailing the late congressman as afounding father of “a fuller, better America” yet to be realized, while forcefully calling Americans to fight the Trump administration’s effort to undermine a cause he 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 – a legacy that extends to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of a black man under the knee of a white police officer.
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| Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy |
“Today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” Obama said, never mentioning his successor. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
“Preach,” a voice rang out from the pews, where mourners sat apart in observation of safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic.
In perhaps his most explicitly political speech since leaving office, Obama assailed Donald 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 sixties, 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.”
His remarks came hours after Trump suggested delaying the November 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 result so the election.
Calling out civil right opponents of the sixties, Obama said: “Bull Connor might be gone but today with our own eyes we witness police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans. George Wallace might be gone … but we can still witness the federal government sending federal agents against peaceful demonstrators … using … teargas.
“As we sit here there are people doing their darndest to stop people from voting … even undermining the postal service … I know this is a celebration of John’s life, there are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things” but to rising applause, Obama said he must speak on about division and injustice.
More than half a century after Lewis was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, in the vanguard of the pivotal Selma to Montgomery civil rights march, the nation is again facing a reckoning over the persistence of racial inequality.
Joining Obama at the funeral on Thursday was former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, who both delivered impassioned remarks.
The Rev Raphael Warnock, presiding over the funeral, read a letter from Jimmy Carter, the former president and a Georgia native, who is now too frail to travel.
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”.
Lewis, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, died on 17 July, aged 80.
“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, in a moment when there is so much political cynicism and narcissism that masquerades as pate time here lies a true American patriot who risked his life and limb for the hope and the promise of democracy,” said the Rev Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at the church.
Speakers recalled Lewis’s legacy but 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 the voting rights 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.
Obama called Lewis “perhaps” Martin Luther King Jr’s “greatest disciple”.
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.” Her voice reverberated through the church where her father once preached, as she echoed Lewis’s famous call for those struggling, using non-violent resistance against injustice to get into “good trouble”.
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.
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 in a deeply personal tribute. “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.”
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