Three former presidents will honor Congressman John Lewis at his funeral in Atlanta, Georgia, Thursday at 11 a.m., completing a week of memorial services for the longtime lawmaker and civil rights icon.
Former President Barack Obama will deliver the eulogy for Lewis, who died earlier this month at age 80. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush will also be speaking, as well as Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.
A memorial service in Troy AlabamaHe celebrated Lewis’s legacy on Saturday, before making his last trip across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Sunday, the same bridge where he was struck by Alabama State Police police during the march to Montgomery on March 7. 1965, which became known as “Bloody Sunday”.
Lewis’s coffin then traveled to Washington, DC, where he was commemorated at a service on the United States Capitol and was the first black lawmaker in be exposed in burning chapel at the Capitol Rotunda.
Lewis was the youngest person to speak at the 1963 March in Washington, and was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. He spoke to CBS News in June about his activism in the 1960s.
“Yes, they beat me, they left me bloody and unconscious. But I never became bitter or hostile, I never gave up. I think that somehow and somehow if it is necessary to use our bodies to help redeem the soul of a nation then we should do it, “Lewis said.
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