Saying goodbye to John Lewis

Persons are paying their respects to US Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon and longtime congressman who died earlier this month on the age of 80.

Lewis’ funeral is happening Thursday on the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the place the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. served as a co-pastor from 1960 till his assassination in 1968.

Former Presidents Invoice Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are in attendance. Obama will ship the eulogy.

Earlier this week, Lewis turned the first Black lawmaker to lie in state at the US Capitol rotunda. On Sunday, an honor guard escorted his body throughout the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, the place Lewis and others have been crushed by police whereas marching for voting rights in 1965.

Lewis, who served Georgia’s fifth Congressional District for greater than 30 years, was extensively seen as an ethical conscience of Congress due to his decades-long embodiment of the nonviolent combat for civil rights. His passionate oratory was backed by an extended file of motion that included, by his depend, greater than 40 arrests whereas demonstrating towards racial and social injustice.