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TRANSCRIPT: Barack Obama's full eulogy of John Lewis
Former President Barack Obama eulogized civil rights icon John Lewis on Thursday before the late congressman's body was laid to rest in Atlanta, drawing a comparison between the battles Lewis participated in during the civil rights movement and the current protests for racial justice happening across America.
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| Former President Barack Obama, addresses the service during the funeral for the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Thursday, July 30, 2020. |
James wrote to the believers, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing."
It is a great honor to be back in Ebenezer Baptist Church, in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple -- an American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance -- John Robert Lewis.
To those who have spoken to Presidents Bush and Clinton, Madam Speaker, Reverend Warnock, Reverend King, John's family, friends, his beloved staff, Mayor Bottoms -- I've come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom.
Now, this country is a constant work in progress. We were born with instructions: to form a more perfect union. Explicit in those words is the idea that we are imperfect; that what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than anyone might have thought possible.
John Lewis -- the first of the Freedom Riders, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, youngest speaker at the March on Washington, leader of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Member of Congress representing the people of this state and this district for 33 years, mentor to young people, including me at the time, until his final day on this Earth -- he not only embraced that responsibility, but he made it his life's work.
Which isn't bad for a boy from Troy. John was born into modest means -- that means he was poor -- in the heart of the Jim Crow South to parents who picked somebody else's cotton. Apparently, he didn't take to farm work -- on days when he was supposed to help his brothers and sisters with their labor, he'd hide under the porch and make a break for the school bus when it showed up. His mother, Willie Mae Lewis, nurtured that curiosity in this shy, serious child. "Once you learn something," she told her son, "once you get something inside your head, no one can take it away from you."
As a boy, John listened through the door after bedtime as his father's friends complained about the Klan. One Sunday as a teenager, he heard Dr. King preach on the radio. As a college student in Tennessee, he signed up for Jim Lawson's workshops on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience. John Lewis was getting something inside his head, an idea he couldn't shake that took hold of him -- that nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were the means to change laws, but also change hearts, and change minds, and change nations, and change the world.
So he helped organize the Nashville campaign in 1960. He and other young men and women sat at a segregated lunch counter, well-dressed, straight-backed, refusing to let a milkshake poured on their heads, or a cigarette extinguished on their backs, or a foot aimed at their ribs, refused to let that dent their dignity and their sense of purpose. And after a few months, the Nashville campaign achieved the first successful desegregation of public facilities in any major city in the South.
John got a taste of jail for the first, second, third...well, several times. But he also got a taste of victory. And it consumed him with righteous purpose. And he took the battle deeper into the South.
That same year, just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of interstate bus facilities was unconstitutional, John and Bernard Lafayette bought two tickets, climbed aboard a Greyhound, sat up front, and refused to move. This was months before the first official Freedom Rides. He was doing a test. The trip was unsanctioned. Few knew what they were up to. And at every stop, through the night, apparently the angry driver stormed out of the bus and into the bus station. And John and Bernard had no idea what he might come back with or who he might come back with. Nobody was there to protect them. There were no camera crews to record events. You know, sometimes, we read about this and kind of take it for granted. Or at least we act as if it was inevitable. Imagine the courage of two people Malia's age, younger than my oldest daughter, on their own, to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression.
John was only twenty years old. But he pushed all twenty of those years to the center of the table, betting everything, all of it, that his example could challenge centuries of convention, and generations of brutal violence, and countless daily indignities suffered by African Americans.
Like John the Baptist preparing the way, like those Old Testament prophets speaking truth to kings, John Lewis did not hesitate -- he kept on getting on board buses and sitting at lunch counters, got his mugshot taken again and again, marched again and again on a mission to change America.
Spoke to a quarter million people at the March on Washington when he was just 23.
Helped organize the Freedom Summer in Mississippi when he was just 24.
At the ripe old age of 25, John was asked to lead the march from Selma to Montgomery. He was warned that Governor Wallace had ordered troopers to use violence. But he and Hosea Williams and others led them across that bridge anyway. And we've all seen the film and the footage and the photographs, and President Clinton mentioned the trench coat, the knapsack, the book to read, the apple to eat, the toothbrush -- apparently jails weren't big on such creature comforts. And you look at those pictures and John looks so young and he's small in stature. Looking every bit that shy, serious child that his mother had raised and yet, he is full of purpose. God's put perserverence in him.
And we know what happened to the marchers that day. Their bones were cracked by billy clubs, their eyes and lungs choked with tear gas. As they knelt to pray, which made their heads even easier targets, and John was struck in the skull. And he thought he was going to die, surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging, and bleeding, and trampled, victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence.
And the thing is, I imagine initially that day, the troopers thought that they had won the battle. You can imagine the coversations they had afterwards. You can imagine them saying, "yeah, we showed them." They figured they'd turned the protesters back over the bridge; that they'd kept, that they'd preserved a system that denied the basic humanity of their fellow citizens. Except this time, there were some cameras there. This time, the world saw what happened, bore witness to Black Americans who were asking for nothing more than to be treated like other Americans. Who were not asking for special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them a century before, and almost another century before that.
When John woke up, and checked himself out of the hospital, he would make sure the world saw a movement that was, in the words of Scripture, "hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." They returned to Brown Chapel, a battered prophet, bandages around his head, and he said more marchers will come now. And the people came. And the troopers parted. And the marchers reached Montgomery. And their words reached the White House -- and Lyndon Johnson, son of the South, said "We shall overcome," and the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.
The life of John Lewis was, in so many ways, exceptional. It vindicated the faith in our founding, redeemed that faith; that most American of ideas; that idea that any of us ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation, and come together, and challenge the status quo, and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest ideals. What a radical ideal. What a revolutionary notion. This idea that any of us, ordinary people, a young kid from Troy can stand up to the powers and principalities and say no this isn't right, this isn't true, this isn't just. We can do better. On the battlefield of justice, Americans like John, Americans like the Reverends Lowery and C.T. Vivian, two other patriots that we lost this year, liberated all of us that many Americans came to take for granted.
America was built by people like them. America was built by John Lewises. He as much as anyone in our history brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals. And someday, when we do finish that long journey toward freedom; when we do form a more perfect union -- whether it's years from now, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries -- John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.
And yet, as exceptional as John was, here's the thing: John never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country can do. I mentioned in the statement the day John passed, the thing about John was just how gentle and humble he was. And despite this storied, remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him -- this idea that any of us can do what he did if we are willing to persevere.
He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, that in all of us there is a longing to do what's right, that in all of us there is a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. So many of us lose that sense. It's taught out of us. We start feeling as if, in fact, that we can't afford to extend kindness or decency to other people. That we're better off if we are above other people and looking down on them, and so often that's encouraged in our culture. But John always saw the best in us. And he never gave up, and never stopped speaking out because he saw the best in us. He believed in us even when we didn't believe in ourselves. As a Congressman, he didn't rest; he kept getting himself arrested. As an old man, he didn't sit out any fight; he sat in, all night long, on the floor of the United States Capitol. I know his staff was stressed.
But the testing of his faith produced perseverance. He knew that the march is not yet over, that the race is not yet won, that we have not yet reached that blessed destination where we are judged by the content of our character. He knew from his own life that progress is fragile; that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country's history, of our own history, with their whirlpools of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again.
Bull Connor may be gone. But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone. But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting -- by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the runup to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don't get sick.
Now, I know this is a celebration of John's life. There are some who might say we shouldn't dwell on such things. But that's why I'm talking about it. John Lewis devoted his time on this Earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what's best in America that we are seeing circulate right now.
He knew that every single one of us has a God-given power. And that the fate of this democracy depends on how we use it; that democracy isn't automatic, it has to be nurtured, it has to be tended to, we have to work at it, it's hard. And so he knew it depends on whether we summon a measure, just a measure, of John's moral courage to question what's right and what's wrong and call things as they are. He said that as long as he had breath in his body, he would do everything he could to preserve this democracy. That as long as we have breath in our bodies, we have to continue his cause. If we want our children to grow up in a democracy -- not just with elections, but a true democracy, a representative democracy, a big-hearted, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive America of perpetual self-creation -- then we are going to have to be more like John. We don't have to do all the things he had to do because he did them for us. But we have got to do something. As the Lord instructed Paul, "Do not be afraid, go on speaking; do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people." Just everybody's just got to come out and vote. We've got all those people in the city but we can't do nothing.
Like John, we have got to keep getting into that good trouble. He knew that nonviolent protest is patriotic; a way to raise public awareness, put a spotlight on injustice, and make the powers that be uncomfortable.
Like John, we don't have to choose between protest and politics, it is not an either-or situation, it is a both-and situation. We have to engage in protests where that is effective but we also have to translate our passion and our causes into laws and institutional practices. That's why John ran for Congress thirty-four years ago.
Like John, we have got to fight even harder for the most powerful tool we have, which is the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act is one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. It's why John crossed that bridge. It's why he spilled his blood. And by the way, it was the result of Democratic and Republican efforts. President Bush, who spoke here earlier, and his father, both signed its renewal when they were in office. President Clinton didn't have to because it was the law when he arrived so instead he made a law that made it easier for people to register to vote.
But once the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, some state legislatures unleashed a flood of laws designed specifically to make voting harder, especially, by the way, state legislatures where there is a lot of minority turnout and population growth. That's not necessarily a mystery or an accident. It was an attack on what John fought for. It was an attack on our democratic freedoms. And we should treat it as such.
If politicians want to honor John, and I'm so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there's a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let's honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn't want us to stop there, trying to get back to where we already were. Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better.
By making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who've earned their second chance.
By adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are someone who is working in a factory, or you are a single mom who has got to go to her job and doesn't get time off, you can still cast your ballot.
By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico. They are Americans.
By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering-- so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around.
And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster -- another Jim Crow relic -- in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that's what we should do.
And yet, even if we do all this -- even if every bogus voter suppression law was struck off the books today -- we have got to be honest with ourselves that too many of us choose not to exercise the franchise; that too many of our citizens believe their vote won't make a difference, or they buy into the cynicism that, by the way, is the central strategy of voter suppression, to make you discouraged, to stop believing in your own power.
So we are also going to have to remember what John said: "If you don't do everything you can to change things, then they will remain the same. You only pass this way once. You have to give it all you have." As long as young people are protesting in the streets, hoping real change takes hold, I'm hopeful but we cannot casually abandon them at the ballot box. Not when few elections have been as urgent, on so many levels, as this one. We cannot treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time. We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy.
Like John, we have to give it all we have.
I was proud that John Lewis was a friend of mine. I met him when I was in law school. He came to speak and I went up and I said, "Mr. Lewis, you are one of my heroes. What inspired me more than anything as a young man was to see what you and Reverend Lawson and Bob Moses and Diane Nash and others did." And he got that kind of -- aw shucks, thank you very much.
The next time I saw him, I had been elected to the United States Senate. And I told him, "John, I am here because of you." On Inauguration Day in 2008, 2009, he was one of the first people that I greeted and hugged on that stand. I told him, "This is your day too."
He was a good and kind and gentle man. And he believed in us -- even when we don't believe in ourselves. It's fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was on Zoom. I am pretty sure that neither he nor I set up the Zoom call because we didn't know how to work it. It was a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who had been helping to lead this summer's demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death. And afterwards, I spoke to John privately, and he could not have been prouder to see this new generation of activists standing up for freedom and equality; a new generation that was intent on voting and protecting the right to vote; in some cases, a new generation running for political office.
I told him, all those young people, John -- of every race and every religion, from every background and gender and sexual orientation -- John, those are your children. They learned from your example, even if they didn't always know it. They had understood, through him, what American citizenship requires, even if they had only heard about his courage through the history books.
"By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white...have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
Dr. King said that in the 1960s. And it came true again this summer.
We see it outside our windows, in big cities and rural towns, in men and women, young and old, straight Americans and LGBTQ Americans, Blacks who long for equal treatment and whites who can no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of their fellow Americans. We see it in everybody doing the hard work of overcoming complacency, of overcoming our own fears and our own prejudices, our own hatreds. You see it in people trying to be better, truer versions of ourselves.
And that's what John Lewis teaches us. That's where real courage comes from. Not from turning on each other, but by turning towards one another. Not by sowing hatred and division, but by spreading love and truth. Not by avoiding our responsibilities to create a better America and a better world, but by embracing those responsibilities with with joy and perseverance and discovering that in our beloved community, we do not walk alone.
What a gift John Lewis was. We are all so lucky to have had him walk with us for a while, and show us the way.
God bless you all. God bless America. God bless this gentle soul who pulled it closer to its promise.
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Obama presses for voting rights in pointed eulogy honoring John Lewis
By Kevin Liptak, CNN (07/30/20)
Inside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s church in Atlanta on Thursday, the nation's first Black president -- who has acknowledged there was a Black president only because of what John Lewis sacrificed -- delivered a eulogy for the civil rights icon and eventual congressman that went well beyond pure remembrance.
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| US President Barack Obama (R) hugs US Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, one of the original marchers at Selma, during an event marking the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015. The Obamas traveled to Selma to commemorate Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers attempting to walk to the Alabama capital of Montgomery to end voting discrimination against African Americans, clashed with police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. |
In words that were both highly specific and at times more oblique, Obama declared Lewis' lifelong battle for racial equality to be ongoing and stated explicitly that forces in power today are working to undermine it.
Drawing a direct line between the bridge in Selma, Alabama, where Lewis was bloodied by state troopers in 1965 and the protests this summer following police killings of Black Americans, Obama delivered his most forceful address since leaving office, casting the actions of his successor -- who avoided any in-person remembrances for Lewis, though three of his four living predecessors made the journey -- as corrosive for democracy.
As Trump wages a reelection campaign reliant on racist tropes and a vague notion of "heritage" that many see rooted in an outdated vision of the country, Obama said Lewis would eventually be remembered as another type of national hero.
"America was built by John Lewises," Obama said. "He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals. And someday, when we do finish that long journey towards freedom, when we do form a more perfect union ... John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America."
It was a dramatic return to the political fray for a former president who has steadfastly worked to avoid becoming a foil for Trump, even as he frets privately and to Democratic donors about Trump's actions and words.
But it was also a deeply personal recognition of a life Obama admitted was necessary for his own political ascent.
"Imagine the courage of two people Malia's age -- younger than my oldest daughter -- on their own, to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression," he said, evoking his 22-year-old eldest child. "John was only 20 years old but he pushed all 20 of those years onto the center of the table."
At a moment when the country is reckoning anew over questions of systemic racism following the police killings of
George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor and countless other Black and Brown Americans, Thursday's funeral was a measuring moment: Both a time to reflect on the grainy black-and-white newsreels of another generation's struggle and an opportunity to assess where that struggle continues to come up short.
It was the type of remembrance that marks the passage of a nation's history, provides a record of its highest and lowest moments and lays down a marker for the type of person -- the type of hero -- deserving of the country's attention and respect.
Lewis' own words kicked off the day of remembrance, with a post-humous
op-ed in The New York Times, that echoed the principles with which he lived his life.
"When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself," he wrote, recalling his own lessons from King.
"It is so fitting on the day of his service, he leaves us our marching orders: Keep moving," former President Bill Clinton said during the funeral.
"He got into a lot of good trouble along the way but let's not forget he also developed an absolutely uncanny ability to heal troubled waters," Clinton added. "He thought that the open hand was better than the clenched fist."
While not at all unexpected, the absence Thursday of the sitting president was conspicuous. Remembering heroes was once something Washington could agree on, an idea that has increasingly seemed to be a relic from another time.
Lewis' funeral wasn't the first high-profile memorial that
Trump has skipped, and as both a lifetime member of the nation's most exclusive club and a renowned grudge-holder, it likely will not be the last.
Yet however obvious it was, Trump's decision to forgo paying his respects -- which he declared decisively even before his aides could weigh the pros and cons -- was still a stark reminder of the rabidly polarized era of politics over which he presides.
He has continued to stoke a racial divide that Lewis spent his life working to bridge. As the country buckled earlier this summer under racial tensions and outcry over police brutality, Trump harkened back to 1960s rhetoric that wouldn't have been unfamiliar to Lewis, who was beaten and bloodied by police during the civil rights movement.
As Trump evoked "vicious dogs" that would restore order and used a phrase coined by a racist police chief in 1968 to warn that "when the looting starts the shooting starts," Lewis encouraged protesters to continue the work that he started decades ago.
The comparisons to a darker era that many hoped had faded were made explicit in Obama's eulogy.
"George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators," he said, referring to the segregationist Alabama governor who ran for president on a hard-right platform in 1968.
It's hard to imagine how those messages or that messenger would have fit in at Lewis' funeral. Yet political leaders have long put aside even their biggest differences to commemorate those few lives that can be said to have altered history.
"John and I had our disagreements, of course," former President George W. Bush said during the funeral on Thursday. "But, in the America John Lewis fought for and in the America I believe in, differences of opinion are inevitable elements and evidence of democracy in action."
Obama-Lewis vision of America
Speaking in 2015 at the 50th anniversary memorial of the "Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, Alabama -- an event that brought together Republicans and Democrats alike -- Obama seemed to predict an era of White nostalgia that would come to pass as a patriotic litmus test under Trump.
Citing marchers like Lewis who were beaten by state troopers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery to demand voting rights, Obama said that was true patriotism -- a stark contrast to Trump, who has decried protesters as un-American and intent on erasing history.
"That's what it means to love America. That's what it means to believe in America," Obama said of the marchers, adding later: "That's what America is, not stock photos or airbrushed history or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American as others."
He repeated some of those themes Thursday, hailing Lewis' example as one to emulate.
"That's where real courage comes from -- not from turning on each other but by turning towards one another," Obama said. "Not by sowing hatred and division but by spreading love and truth. Not by avoiding our responsibilities to create a better America and a better world but by embracing those responsibilities with joy and perseverance. And discovering that, in our beloved community, we do not walk alone."
That vision of America is not necessarily shared by Obama's successor, who has used monuments and statues, including those to Confederate generals, as a rallying cry in his reelection bid.
Both men have governed during times of intense racial divide: Obama reckoned with racially charged protests in Missouri and Maryland during his second term, and Trump now confronts ongoing unrest and outcry over the more recent police killings.
It was always unlikely that Obama would forgo the opportunity on Thursday to raise, again, the issues of racial disparity that continue to grip the nation.
In his speech, Obama listed a series of items that he said would make voting more fair and ensure every American is enfranchised: restoring the Voting Rights Act, allowing former inmates to vote, adding polling locations, making Election Day a federal holiday and allowing Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico to have full representation in Congress.
He also called for an end to the filibuster, the Senate rule that has allowed the minority party to stall legislation and that Obama called a remnant of Jim Crow.
Obama has used funerals in the past to deliver searing speeches on race -- most notably during a eulogy for the murdered pastor of a Charleston church that ended with a sung verse of "Amazing Grace."
And while he has openly attributed the possibility of his election to forebears like Lewis -- "I was only there because of the sacrifices he made," Obama said he told Lewis at his inauguration -- he has also been frank that neither the fact he was elected nor the efforts he made while in office have been enough to combat still-existent racial divides.
"Thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders -- to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise," Obama said in his statement following Lewis' death earlier this month.
Nearly every other American political leader in Washington -- including Vice President Mike Pence, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, along with Democrats such as former Vice President Joe Biden -- paid in-person tribute to Lewis this week in some fashion.
A cursory acknowledgment
Trump did issue a cursory statement on Twitter following the civil rights leader's death and ordered flags lowered: "Saddened to hear the news of civil rights hero John Lewis passing. Melania and I send our prayers to he and his family," he tweeted.
It did not go unnoticed that his Twitter remembrance of the late television host Regis Philbin, who also died recently, was nearly three times as long.
In an era of intense political divides, Trump's decision to avoid Lewis' funeral is not surprising. Lewis refused to attend Trump's inauguration in 2017 and declared him an illegitimate president. Trump subsequently said Lewis should focus on improving his district, calling it "crime infested."
When Trump announced unequivocally that he would not travel to the Capitol to pay his respects, some aides were caught off-guard because the issue hadn't been decisively settled on internally, one administration official said.
Trump's distaste for the rituals of remembrance and tradition for people he dislikes have by now been well established. While he has shown an affinity for some trappings of his job, the President has little patience for its rituals when they do not revolve around him. Aides have said they have little interest in bringing Trump to places he is clearly unwelcome and could become a distraction.
He has shown similar disregard -- and at times open hostility -- for those idolized by most of the Washington establishment, at least in death. He was pointedly not invited to the funeral held in the Washington National Cathedral for Sen. John McCain, who was eulogized instead by two former presidents, George W. Bush and Obama.
Instead of attending that funeral, Trump played a round of golf and, according to aides, sulked at the attention and adulation being mounted upon one of his avowed nemeses. Later, he complained that McCain's family never thanked him for approving certain aspects of the service.
The one prominent funeral that Trump did attend, for former President George H.W. Bush, remains the only time he's come face-to-face with his living predecessors since his inauguration. The encounter, at least by the looks of video footage, was chilly.
This month, Trump removed portraits of the younger Bush and Clinton that were hanging prominently in the White House and moved them to a room used to store tablecloths and unused furniture.
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Column: John Lewis' funeral, a rhetorical master class, shows that great speeches still matter
Mary McNamara, LA Times (07/30/20)
Befitting the man it memorialized, Thursday’s funeral of John Lewis in Atlanta was an oratorical symphony, a rhetorical masterwork of pride, praise and calls to continue the great man’s work.
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| Former President Barack Obama addresses the service during the funeral for Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. on Thursday. |
Three former presidents spoke, all with emotional admiration for the 80-year-old civil rights leader and longtime Democratic congressman from Georgia’s 5th District, who died on July 17.
Barack Obama delivered the rousing, heartfelt keynote, in which he called on Americans to pay their respects to Lewis by continuing his work at a time when Black lives and voting rights remain at risk, but
Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush spoke just as powerfully and well of a man who always put truth before politics.
As did Lewis’ niece Sheila Lewis O’Brien, Rev. Dr. Bernice King, activist Xernona Clayton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church where the funeral was held, and the others who spoke.
For a country confined by pandemic and, more important, a culture increasingly dependent on often unreliable social media platforms for the exchange of information, ideas, insight and calls to action, it was like a sustained rainfall in the middle of a drought — a reminder of the unique and necessary artistry of the spoken word.
Lewis certainly understood the power of public eloquence; at the age of 15, he famously heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the radio and it changed his life.
Arrested 45 times during more than half a century spent fighting for civil rights and beaten unconscious in 1965 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where he and 600 peaceful protesters marched toward the vicious batons of Alabama State Troopers, Lewis was very much a man of action as well as words.
But from his
keynote before the 1963 March on Washington to a recent Zoom meeting in which he and former President Barack Obama spoke with a group of activists, Lewis was himself such a master of the microphone that when
his final essay appeared in Thursday’s New York Times, we could hear his voice as we read.
Quiet, calm and absolutely relentless, Lewis was a tireless and democratic speaker, as comfortable on late-night and morning talk shows as he was in Congress or at any VIP table. He said what he thought — he believed, for instance, that Russian interference in the 2016 election rendered Donald Trump’s presidency illegitimate — and backed it up with action: He did not attend Trump's inauguration. (Which may be why Trump did not speak at Lewis’ funeral or earlier this week, when Lewis became the first Black lawmaker to
lie in state at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.)
Obviously, no one is going to come to praise and bury John Lewis without preparing the best speech possible.
That kind of preparation — the crafting of tone and phrase, of pause and crescendo; the matching of message with music — has fallen out of favor recently. The turn-of-the-millennium rise of personal narrative as a valid and necessary social force gave us a new vernacular — “authenticity,” which often values the awkward and imprecise over the polished, the raw and emotional over the thoughtfully argued or poetically rendered.
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| Rep. John Lewis, who died July 17 at 80. |
Since then, social media has become the preferred manner of social discourse, and with a reliance on immediacy, brevity and niche marketing, much of it is not designed for complex phrasing.
Don’t get me wrong. The validation of personal narratives is one of the biggest cultural revolutions of all time. The definition of what makes anything good or valid, beautiful or important, has long been controlled by a relative few — including those deemed great public speakers. Relaxing the standards of oratory has, like social media, given millions too long kept silent the chance to speak without fear of being disparaged for noneloquence.
Unfortunately, our demand for “authenticity” has been accompanied by a rejection of the carefully considered. Rhetoric, which actually means the art of speaking or writing effectively, is considered elitist by some, synonymous with obfuscation or phoniness by others. Consistent messaging is often dismissed as “talking points” (as if repetition itself implies insincerity), and, as
Hillary Clinton found, a ready-made response or speech is often dinged for seeming “over-thought” or “rehearsed.”
Like pretty much everything, oration has long been judged by traditions and preconceptions: Women’s naturally higher-pitched voices kept many of them from lists of great public speakers, and the preference for round vowels eliminates people whose accents do not conform. It's a talent, like the ability to deliver any great performance, and like any performative talent, it requires experience to perfect. Lewis, as former president Bush remembered on Thursday, began his oratorical career preaching to his chickens.
Still, if you think any of history’s great speeches were not “over-thought” and in some way rehearsed, you’re missing the point. Practice is the mother of authenticity.
Lewis spoke often about the preparation that allowed him and fellow activists to endure the threats and violence they experienced, the rigor that allowed them to overcome natural reactions of fear and rage.
Yes, there are people, born with natural eloquence, who can deliver impromptu words to make you weep or burn to improve the world this minute.
But watching the powerful, loving and rhetorically adept speeches delivered in honor of John Lewis, it was impossible not to also see the time, care and thought that went into them. Were they meticulously crafted and possibly rehearsed? Yes. Were they authentic? Absolutely.
During his eulogy, Bill Clinton recounted asking Lewis about the closest he had ever come to being killed while protesting. Lewis described a moment when, having been knocked down during a demonstration, he saw a man lifting a heavy pipe clearly aimed at Lewis’ head. At the last minute, Lewis turned away and the crowd surged forward, separating the man from him; Lewis considered himself lucky to be alive.
Clinton, however, thought Lewis survived for reasons other than luck. “First, because he was a quick thinker. And second, because he was here on a mission that was bigger than personal ambition.
"Things like that sometimes just happen,” Clinton said, “but usually they don’t.”
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Obama's eulogy for John Lewis signals pivotal day in 2020 election: OPINION
ABC News (07/30/20)
The civil rights icon fought his entire life for voting rights, justice and equality, and Obama extolled us to continue that fight, while Trump wants to do something that is not only unconstitutional, it is something no president in our history has floated. Abraham Lincoln didn't do during the Civil War in 1864, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't do in the midst of World War II in 1944.
One line really struck me from Obama's speech: "And so he knew that it depends on whether we summon a measure, just a measure, of John's moral courage to question what's right and what's wrong."
He is right; we must not turn a blind eye or neglect the injustice of the present and the brokenness of our democracy. Whether it be attacks on people of color, impediments purposely put in place to restrict voting, authoritarian moves by those in power or divisiveness in our politics that doesn't allow us to solve fundamental problems facing our not-as-yet "perfect union," we are called to action.
This is not just a problem in the South, or in cities in the West, it crosses all geographic boundaries and communities across America.
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| Pam Hooks, left, and Eddie Smith watch the funeral procession for civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis as his casket arrives at Ebenezer Baptist Church on July 30, 2020, in Atlanta. |
I was born in Detroit and grew up in the area amidst riots, civil strife and racial inequality, and I witnessed racism and discrimination on a regular basis. When I visit Michigan today I still see signs of that injustice. People fly Confederate flags on their vehicles or show up with Nazi symbols on their clothes while carrying guns at the State Capitol and threatening a female governor.
Many thought we were past all this when America elected its first African American president, but we have unfortunately seen an underbelly of racism rise its ugly head and white supremacy been encouraged by leaders in the most powerful positions of these United States.
Yes, some things have changed and improved, as in my native state, which voted for segregationist George Wallace in the Democratic primary in 1972, and just 16 years later voted for Jesse Jackson for president. However, the path of justice and a "more perfect union" is still incomplete and we have seen setbacks on a daily basis in the year 2020. We must be better and we must do more.
In 2017, I suggested that America was more divided than it had ever been since the Civil War. I was criticized roundly by many supporters of Trump. Tragically, I was accurate in my assessment.
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| Former President Barack Obama speaks during the funeral of late Congressman John Lewis at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, July 30, 2020. |
Who is going to repair this broken democracy and heal our divides? I would like to say it can all be done by electing unifying leaders who call us to our better angels. Yes, that is a good step, but the responsibility fundamentally falls on each of us in our daily lives to summon some of Lewis's moral courage and stand up for justice and equality and push back against the force of hate with the power of love.
It is in the words and actions we engage in with others and whether they hurt or help our fellow citizens. It is taking voting seriously and not only voting ourselves, but encouraging and helping others to vote. It is in demanding the removal of impediments to voting for all Americans. It is helping those we see in need in our neighborhoods. It is not remaining quiet when we hear hateful words directed at another. It is putting our arms around our neighbors no matter their race, faith, age, disability, gender, sexual orientation or income and making sure they have an equal space at the American table and demanding decency.
Yes, today was a pivotal moment in this election and the 21st century. And the responsibility falls squarely on our shoulders. We must dig deep down in our hearts and souls and summon just some of the courage of Lewis and be the change our country and the world hungers for. We can do this.
