Obama hails John Lewis as Martin Luther King Jr’s finest disciple at funeral, slams Trump for stifling voters
John Lewis, the veteran Democratic Congressman from Georgia and a Civil Rights icon, died on Friday, July 17, at the age of 80. Lewis had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer late in 2019 and his condition deteriorated in the week leading up to his death.
At Lewis’s funeral in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday, July 30, former President Barack Obama delivered a rousing eulogy and celebrated the leader’s life. “He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals,” Obama said, hailing him as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “finest disciple”.
Lewis, Obama said, was an “American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable resilience,” and added that he “owed a great debt” to Lewis.
But the 44th U.S. President did not just sing the praises of Lewis. During the speech, he also took the opportunity to raise awareness about what he claimed were efforts to stifle voting in the country that is due for a presidential election later this year.
On Thursday, hours before the funeral ceremony, the United States woke up to a series of tweets by President Donald Trump suggesting that the upcoming presidential election should be delayed on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE and FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote???” Trump tweeted.
Obama, in his speech, said, “Even as we sit here, there are those in power who 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 run-up to an election. It's going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don't get sick.”
Obama said that Lewis had “devoted his time on this Earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what's best in America that we're seeing circulate right now,” adding that, “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 somebody who's working in a factory or you're a single mom, who's got to go to her job and doesn't get time off, you can still cast your ballot,” said Obama. “By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington DC, and in Puerto Rico.”
Obama also spoke about the Black Lives Matter movement and the use of police brutality, that was both the reason for and the consequence of several protests that have sprung up across the country, following the death of George Floyd and other Black people at the hands of the police.
During his speech, Obama called on the country to be “vigilant against the darker currents” of the nation’s history. “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, where there are whirlpools of violence and hatred and despair that can always rise again,” Obama said.
While he did not go into specifics -- and there are plenty of instances of this -- Obama called out federal government agents using “tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
"Today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace (the 45th Governor of Alabama, notorious for his staunch segregationist views) may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators,” Obama said.
Obama was not the only former President who delivered a speech at the funeral. George W. Bush and Bill Clinton too shared personal memories of working alongside Lewis in Washington and the lessons he taught them and the nation.