People pay their respects to the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., lying in state on the East Front Steps of the U.S. Capitol on July 28, 2020, in Washington.Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press
On a sweltering August day in 1963, John Lewis was the youngest speaker to address the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Standing on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, the 23-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called for a “revolution” that would sweep away Jim Crow laws, economic inequality and racist police violence.
“We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again,” he said. “Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes.”
Nearly 57 years later, at the other end of the National Mall, Mr. Lewis’s flag-draped casket sat at the entrance to the U.S. Capitol. A congressman for 33 years, he died of pancreatic cancer on July 17 at 80.
His memorial, amid the largest wave of protests since the Civil Rights movement he helped lead, marked a moment for a divided nation to grapple with all the ways the revolution Mr. Lewis sought has succeeded and failed in the intervening decades. It was also held on the same day that, elsewhere in the building, President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement official defended cracking down on demonstrators and denied that racism is a significant problem in the country.
Mr. Lewis was the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda, where a group of 100 legislators – all sitting two metres apart – paid tribute. With the building closed to the public amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Lewis’s casket was then moved outside to the top of the east steps. Mourners lined up for as long as two hours in 34 C heat Monday evening and all day Tuesday to file past at the bottom of the staircase.
Carole Cornelius, a retired social worker who came from Philadelphia to pay her respects, recalled running into segregation on childhood road trips to visit family in the southern states: the gas station that ordered her father to walk around to the back of the building if he wanted to buy food, or the time a white stranger brought her ice cream as she waited on the sidewalk because she was not allowed into the shop.
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She followed the protests of the 1960s on television. Her uncle, a deacon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, was a pallbearer for Martin Luther King Jr. And for a long time, she said, she thought things really had changed. But that belief was shattered by the racist backlash Barack Obama faced as president, and the increasingly visible instances of police killing unarmed Black people in recent years.
“It hurts, because there was so much momentum during the Civil Rights era. I can travel anywhere I want to in the country now,” said Ms. Cornelius, 67. “But the hatred of Black people is now bubbling up to the surface. Racism is alive and well.”
The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., for instance – where state troopers fractured Mr. Lewis’s skull when they attacked the 1965 march for voting rights he was leading – is still named after a former Confederate officer and Ku Klux Klan leader. Some have called over the years for the bridge to be renamed after Mr. Lewis, whose casket was symbolically carried across it this past weekend by a horse-drawn caisson before heading to Washington.
And even as Ms. Cornelius spoke outside the Capitol Tuesday morning, Attorney-General Bill Barr was inside justifying the gassing and beating of anti-racism protesters in Washington and Portland, Ore., by federal police and paramilitary forces over the past two months.
At a hearing of the House judiciary committee, Mr. Barr characterized the demonstrators as “violent rioters and anarchists” bent on “senseless havoc and destruction.” He also said that “other Blacks” are more to blame than the police for violence against Black people.
“I don’t agree that there’s systemic racism in the police departments, or generally in this country,” the Attorney-General said.
Mr. Trump was one of the few dignitaries to skip Mr. Lewis’s memorial. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and Vice-President Mike Pence both attended. Mr. Trump had attacked Mr. Lewis on Twitter in the past, deriding his district as “crime infested.” Mr. Lewis once compared the President to George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama.
Mr. Lewis was first elected to Congress, representing an Atlanta-based district, in 1987. But his legislative achievements had begun long before. His Civil Rights activism was largely responsible for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which bars states from disenfranchising people based on race. In the House, he repeatedly pushed to reauthorize and expand the act, and also fought for universal health care and LGBTQ rights, and against the invasion of Iraq.
“He was the conscience of the Congress,” said Lucia Riddle, 71, a retired lobbyist who often watched Mr. Lewis in action on the Hill. “They talk about him being humble and loving and kind, and he was all that, but he was also sharp and pointed in committee hearings.”
Despite the gulf between the society Mr. Lewis demanded in 1963 and the state of the nation today, her friend Francesca Britton expressed optimism that the current wave of protests would make lasting change, their multiracial and generational makeup reflecting the broad diversity the Civil Rights movement had envisaged.
“I’m really excited about where the country is now. The diversity of the demonstrators is impressive,” said Ms. Britton, a 71-year-old artist. “I think generationally, it gets better and better.”
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