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By Doha Madani
Crowds watched solemnly Sunday as the physique of Rep. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge one closing time, 55 several years right after the civil rights icon marched for peace and was fulfilled with brutality in Selma, Alabama.
Entire body bearers from the U.S. armed forces put the late Ga congressman and civil rights icon onto a horse-drawn caisson Sunday at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church. From there, the community were permitted to line up to honor Lewis for about a half-mile to the foot of the bridge.
Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., thanked Lewis’ family through a ceremony at the chapel for sharing the congressman with the public for so several many years.
“Our country is better off mainly because of John Robert Lewis,” she remarked. “My lifestyle is much better, Selma is better, this nation and this earth is superior simply because of John Robert Lewis.”
Crowds waited for Lewis’ system at the foot of the bridge, the place he was fulfilled by Alabama condition troopers, who properly escorted him across and on to the state Capitol.
“His final march, that last crossing, so distinctive than the very first, speaks to the legacy that he leaves guiding and the life that he transformed,” Sewell said. “It is poetic justice that this time, Alabama condition troopers will see John to his protection. “
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As the horse-drawn caisson approached the bridge, the crowds on the sidewalk could be read singing for Lewis. In an psychological instant, the voices stopped as Lewis’ casket commenced to make its way across the bridge in silent reverence.
Lewis, who died on July 17 at the age of eighty, made his previous journey throughout the bridge with only his family to be a part of him.
Lewis’ son, brothers and sister adopted guiding the caisson along Lewis’ longtime chief of employees carrying shirts emblazoned with the terms “Great Issues,” a nod to Lewis’ perspective on activism.
The 16-phrase lawmaker, usually identified as the conscience of Congress, was a huge of the civil rights motion of the sixties. Lewis was only twenty five when he considered Alabama troopers would get rid of him on the peaceful march for voting rights across the bridge on March 7, 1965, which grew to become identified as “Bloody Sunday.”
Lewis experienced a fractured cranium and was just one of dozens of nonviolent protesters who were being hospitalized. Information coverage of the brutal beatings prompted increased pressure on Congress to go the 1965 Voting Rights Act, barring states from implementing discriminatory legislation that had very long hindered possible Black voters.
And while Lewis is quite possibly ideal known for his march in Selma, he experienced by now emerged as a leading voice in the fight for equivalent rights and experienced been arrested a quantity of occasions for the trigger by that time.
As a student at Fisk University in Tennessee, Lewis helped manage sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. He was one particular of the original Flexibility Riders in 1961, taking buses from the North to the Deep South to protest segregation at interstate bus terminals.
At 23, Lewis was the youngest person who spoke at the 1963 March on Washington for Careers and Independence. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the time.
Phone calls have grown to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge following Lewis, to honor the person who was arguably a lion in the struggle for equality. A petition commenced in June by political strategist Michael Starr Hopkins, who instructed NBC Information at the time that the strategy arrived to him though observing Ava DuVernay’s “Selma” next times of protesting.
But Lewis’ demise amplified the get in touch with to rename the bridge, which now honors a Confederate normal and KKK leader.
Selma officers, having said that, oppose the identify alter, in accordance to the Associated Push. Alabama point out Rep. Prince Chestnut, whose legislative district incorporates Selma, mentioned it would be inappropriate to rename the bridge for Lewis by itself.
“There ended up a lot of Selmians and Alabamians who were either on the bridge in March 1965, in close proximity to the vicinity or precipitated the predicament that changed this place for the far better. John was not the only just one,” Chestnut claimed in a assertion to The Affiliated Press.
Chestnut reported he’d favor contacting it a thing more standard, these types of as the “Bloody Sunday Bridge” or “Historic Selma Bridge,” instead than naming it for Lewis.
But Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C, advised MSNBC following Lewis’ demise that the Georgia congressman experienced created unmatched sacrifices for the civil legal rights lead to.
“Consider his name off that bridge and switch it with a very good man — John Lewis, the personification of the goodness of The us — instead than honor someone who disrespected personal freedoms,” Clyburn mentioned.
Doha Madani is a breaking news reporter for NBC Information.
