Saturday began in Troy, Alabama, a celebration of the life of longtime Rep. John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement and a Georgia congressman. The memorials will continue for six days in five cities.
Congressman Lewis has “come home,” Troy Mayor Jason Reeves said at the start of service Saturday morning in the town where sharecroppers’ Lewis was born in 1940.
The mayor continued to remember the man who rose to become the “conscience of Congress” for having “courage from another world.”
Lewis, who represented Atlanta in the House of Representatives, died on July 17 after a month-long battle with cancer. He was 80 years old.
His body was taken Saturday morning from an Atlanta funeral home to his hometown for service at Troy University attended by four of his brothers and where gospel singer Dottie Peoples performed.
“His faith in God made him extraordinary,” said Lewis’s sister Rosa Tyner. “He lived with an endless desire to help others. He would often tell us, ‘If you see something wrong, do something.’ His actions showed us exactly that. At a time when going to jail was perceived as a problem, we he remembered it was a good problem. Necessary problems. “
Lewis’s nephew-grandson, Jackson Lewis, remembered him as a “hero.”
“It is up to us to keep his legacy alive,” said the boy.
Another sister, Ethel Tyner, recalled that she and her family were farmers and that Lewis, whom the family called Robert, began preaching at an early age.
“When the clouds came out over the sun, he would start singing and preaching,” he said. “And there is a song that always begins: ‘There is a dark cloud rising, let’s go home. Let’s go home.'”
“For my brother Robert, this is not goodbye, but a different kind of greeting,” Tyner finished his speech. “Rest, Robert. Rest well.”
One of Lewis’s brothers said, “He was a congressman for most, John for the others, Robert and Uncle Robert for the family, but the most important role he played for me was to be my older brother.”
The man who urged activists to get into “trouble” will remain on campus at the university until a service Saturday night at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama. The church served as a starting point for the march of voting rights to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.
Lewis was beaten with blood and suffered a skull fracture when protesters crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were greeted by about 150 Alabama state police officers, sheriff’s officers, and gang men, who ordered the protesters to disperse. That day he earned the nickname “Bloody Sunday,” and images of Lewis being beaten up by police in riot gear helped drive Congress’s approval of the Voting Rights Act later that year.
On Sunday morning, Lewis will cross the bridge for the last time.
The tribute to his life and accomplishments will continue for the next few days in Montgomery, Alabama and Washington, DC before he returns to Atlanta, where Lewis will be buried on Thursday.
