On Thursday, mourners honored civil rights icon and former Rep. John Lewis in Atlanta. At his funeral ceremony, the first black president of the United States, Barack Obama, delivered a commendation that served both to pay tribute to one of the greatest leaders of the American civil rights movement and to call for specific actions to continue that legacy. It will probably turn out to be one of Obama’s best speeches, and worth seeing in its entirety.
In a speech that was almost surprising in his outspoken invocation of politics, Obama compared the brutal violence of 1965 that nearly ended Lewis’s life (police fractured his skull on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama) with repression. violent protests by the federals. Officials today, calling on the 2013 Supreme Court decision to gut the Voting Rights Act and the wave of voter repression that followed “an attack that John fought for,” challenged hypocritical leaders of Congress who they opposed a renewal of “the law that [Lewis] he was ready to die, “while issuing empty statements calling him” hero, “called for an end to the deprivation of rights of previously incarcerated people, called for Election Day to be a national holiday, called for statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and called for “Eliminating the Filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, to secure the God-given rights of every American.”
The barn of a political speech followed a powerful recounting of some of the highlights of Lewis’s life and career, a narrative that laid the foundation for Obama’s call to action. It seemed clear that Obama was devastated by the death of a man he called a mentor.
“It is a great honor to be back at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the pulpit of your best pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to pay my respects to perhaps his best disciple,” Obama said near the beginning of his remarks, his voice almost breaks.
“I came here today because, like many Americans, I owe a great debt to John Lewis and his energetic vision of freedom,” Obama continued.
Obama then described Lewis’s emergence from a “modest media” location in rural Troy, Alabama, where, as a child, he listened to his father’s conversations with friends about the murderous violence of the local Ku Klux Klan. As Obama described, after listening to King speak on the radio, Lewis became one of the greatest advocates of nonviolent resistance this country has seen.
“He helped organize the Nashville campaign in 1960. He and other young men and women sat at a segregated, well-dressed, upright lunch counter, refusing to let a smoothie spill on their heads or an unlit cigarette in Refuse to let that affect your dignity and your sense of purpose, “said Obama.” And after a few months, the Nashville campaign achieved the first successful desegregation of public facilities in any city. important from the south. John tried prison for the first, second, third, well, several times. But he also tasted victory and consumed it with a just purpose and took the battle further south. “Then Obama described Lewis’s work for desegregate buses in the south “months before Freedom’s first official trips.”
But the Obama narrative was not just a powerful narrative of the life of an icon and founding member of the most democratic stage of American democracy, but it linked Lewis’s work in the 1960s with America’s current struggle with authoritarianism and voter repression.
“Sometimes we read about it and take it for granted, or at least act as if it were inevitable. Imagine the courage of two people Malia’s age, younger than my oldest daughter, on her own, to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression, “she said.” John was only 20 years old, but he pushed all those 20 years to the center of the table, betting everything, everything, that his example could challenge centuries of convention and generations of brutal violence and countless daily indignities suffered by African Americans. “
Finally, Obama resorted to a powerful and direct political attack on current police brutality against blacks and voter suppression efforts and protests.
“Bull Connor,” the infamous Birmingham, Alabama police commissioner who turned firefighter dogs and hoses into civil rights era protesters, “may have disappeared, but today we are witnessing, with our own eyes, kneeling police officers on the neck of African Americans, “Obama said, referring to the murder of George Floyd. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness how our federal government sends officers to use tear gas and batons against peaceful protesters,” he added, referring to attacks ordered by the Trump administration on protesters in Lafayette Square in DC and in Portland, Oregon.
Obama concluded by proposing that the United States honor the late congressman by enacting a new John Lewis Voting Rights Act and other measures to protect the vote, and ending the filibuster’s “Jim Crow relic” if necessary to pass it.
Obama was one of the best funeral prayers for an American president: a tribute to Lewis’s life and a specific and actionable plea to protect the rights for which he and so many others fought and bled to death. History will determine whether his call, and Lewis’s, has been heard in the United States.
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