The late United States Representative John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for the last time on Sunday as memories of the civil rights legend continue.
A crowd began to gather near the bridge that became a milestone in the fight for racial justice when Lewis and other civil rights protesters were beaten there 55 years ago on “Bloody Sunday,” a key event in the fight for African American voting rights.
A horse-drawn hearse drove the route through Selma from the African Methodist Episcopal Church of the Brown Chapel, where the 1965 march began.
As the car approached the bridge, members of the crowd yelled, “Thank you, John Lewis!” and “Good Problem”: The phrase Lewis used to describe his entanglements with white authorities during the civil rights movement.
John Lewis broke his skull during a march in Selma for equal voting rights in 1965 [Brynn Anderson/Reuters]
Some of the crowd sang the evangelical song “Woke up this morning with my mind” in Jesus. Some viewers later sang the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome and similar songs.
The hearse stopped on the bridge over the Alabama River as the cicadas sang in the summer heat.
On the south side of the bridge, where Lewis was hit by Alabama state soldiers in 1965, family members placed roses on which the car rolled, marking the place where Lewis shed his blood and sustained a serious head injury. .
When a military honor guard lifted Lewis’s coffin out of the boxcar in a hearse, state soldiers saluted Lewis.
A native of Pike County, Alabama, Lewis became involved in the civil rights movement when he was young.
In 1965, he and other protesters, calling for equal rights for all voters, regardless of race, were beaten in Selma when Alabama segregationist governor George Wallace ordered a crackdown.
News coverage of the event helps drive support for the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Amid ongoing national protests against racism and a movement to abolish Confederate monuments and symbols, calls have grown to rename the bridge in honor of Lewis.
Currently called after Edmund Winston Pettus, a former Confederate Brigadier General and leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
Memorial week
Lewis’s body will then be taken to the Alabama Capitol in the afternoon for rest.
A series of events began Saturday in Troy, Alabama, Lewis’ hometown, to pay tribute to the late congressman and his legacy. He will bed down on the United States Capitol next week before his private funeral Thursday at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was once led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Frank and Ellen Hill drove for more than four hours from Monroe, Louisiana, to see the procession.
John Lewis was the youngest of the so-called Big Six activists who helped organize the march in Washington where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr delivered his infamous I Have a Dream speech. [File: Yuri Gripas/Reuters]
Frank Hill, 60, said he remembers, as an African American boy, seeing news footage of Lewis and other civil rights protesters beaten by law enforcement officers.
“I had to go back and see John Lewis cross the bridge one last time,” Hill said. It’s fun to see state troopers here to honor and respect him rather than beat him up, “Hill told The Associated Press.
Lewis, 80, died on July 17, several months after he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
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