The body of Rep. John Lewis, the son of a sharecropper raised in the Alabama woods, will cross the infamous bridge in Selma on Sunday morning, where Lewis became a wounded but more determined warrior in the fight for racial equity decades ago.
Lewis, often called the conscience of Congress, died earlier this month at the age of 80, from pancreatic cancer. The procession over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, accompanied by a military honor guard, is one of several events marking the congressman’s death, including two days lying in state in the U.S. Capitol, adding him to the list of just 32 American figures to ever do so.
In every way that America seems capable of today, Lewis is a most honored man. Political allies and absolute foes have described him in laudatory terms (even while, in some cases, attaching the wrong man’s photo). Discussions have turned to renaming the bridge for Lewis instead of its current namesake, an Alabama senator and Ku Klux Klan leader. The Selma expanse is where Lewis once believed he would be killed at 25, as he led protesters who marched for the right to vote only to be met by police officers who brutally attacked the protesters.
But, unlike like the days and weeks after the bloody attack in March 1965, or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, there has been no bipartisan talk of honoring Lewis, a 16-term congressman, by passing actual laws.
“He was one of a shrinking crew of people who were essential to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and after,” said Graham Dodds, an American-born political scientist who teaches about American politics at Concordia University in Montreal.
“If you wanted to be cynical, you would say, had it not been for the death of George Floyd,” Dodds continued, “Congressman Lewis’s death would not have been so publicly marked. But, I also think that the tradition of saying nice things about the dead has something to do with what’s happening here. What I don’t see, what may also be telling, is his death changing any minds. I don’t think the folks who opposed what he stood for are about to embrace voting rights for all now.”
Lewis’s sense that activism and action was essential began as a teenager who, from his home near Troy, Alabama, watched the young preacher from Georgia leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott just 50 miles away. Soon, Lewis was patterning his life after King, deciding he would be a preacher.
Lewis’ first sermon, delivered days after his 16th birthday, landed Lewis in the “Negro section” of the local newspaper. His subject: the biblical figure Hannah’s promise to God that if she were blessed with one child despite her advanced age, she would raise him to be a man of moral courage.