ATLANTA, Georgia –Private funeral services were held Thursday, July 30 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia for the late Democratic congressman John Lewis and drew three presidents, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, several other members of Congress, community activists, and a cadre of members of Atlanta's Black community.
The son of sharecroppers and a community activist who rose to become one of the most respected and distinguished members of Congress, Lewis died July 17 in Atlanta at 80-years-old following a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer.
President Donald Trump was conspicuously absent.
The Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor at Ebenezer church, was the moderator, the church once led by the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Speakers included Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, former Atlanta mayor William Campbell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and former U.S. presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president.
The articulate Obama delivered the eulogy.
Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Barbara Lee of California were among a group of members of Congress in attendance, as were U.S. Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.
Also among the prominent dignitaries were Stacy Abrams, and Lewis' close friend Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta and prior U.S. ambassador.
President Bush mentioned the Emmett Til Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act when he spoke, a bill Lewis introduced that became law when he was president. And he described Rep. Lewis as a Civil Rights icon and a feudal legislator par excellence.'
"We live in a better and nobler country today because of John Lewis and his abiding faith in the power of God, and the power of Democracy," said Bush, who drew a standing ovations, as did Clinton, Obama and Pelosi, Clinton and Pelosi nearly brought to tears as they spoke.
Pelosi served more than 30 years in Congress with Lewis and said that "when he spoke people listened, when he led people followed."
"We loved him so much," Pelosi said.
Clinton described Lewis as a man he loved and said his life's legacy was one of service and a commitment to civil and human rights across the board.
"He [Lewis] was here on a mission that was bigger than personal ambition, " said Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar.
Lewis ultimately supported Obama for the Democratic primary in 2008 that Obama won over Hillary Clinton, and he backed him again in 2012 for his successful reelection campaign for president.
On Thursday Obama said Lewis helped to catapult him to the presidency and supported him throughout his tenure as president.
"I have come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom," said Obama while delivering his brilliant eulogy.
He said America was built by people like John Lewis.
A former community organizer of the south side of Chicago and Illinois state senator, and a U.S. senator before he won the presidency, Obama said that Lewis was a man of "pure joy and unbreakable perseverance."
The former president said that Lewis' life was exceptional in so many ways, and that "he challenged the entire infrastructure of oppression."
'"John Lewis," said Obama, "will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America."
And Obama urged people to continuing fighting for the right to vote, and to continue engaging in effective protests. And he said that the right to vote is one of America's greatest achievements, and that the Voting Rights Act has been "weakened by the Supreme Court."
The homecoming celebration was televised across several news channels and went on for more than three hours.
It was full of song, prayer, and tributes to Lewis, the talented and famed Jenifer Holliday among those who sang.
It was the final episode of a series of events to celebrate the life of the beloved congressman, which began July 25 in his home town of Troy, Alabama, and included Lewis lying in state in both Montgomery Alabama, and Washington D.C., the nation's capital.
Lewis' family members wore masks with his name across them.
The six-day long salute to the congressman engaged the media, Lewis now one of the most celebrate political figure in American history.
Mourners lined the streets of Selma, Alabama Sunday afternoon to pay tribute to the congressman, who made his final trip Sunday across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a horse drawn carriage that held his casket, a bridge that he crossed along side of the late Dr. King more than 55-years-ago to demand passage of the Voting Rights Act.
When the young 25-year-old Lewis marched across the bridge from Selma to Montgomery with Dr. King decades ago on Sunday, March 7, 1965, he and other Civil Rights advocates were beaten, brutalized, and bloodied.
They would return to cross the bridge year after year to celebrate the anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," a turning point in the Civil Rights movement.
A former Georgia state legislator out of Atlanta and 17-term Democratic Congressman who represented Georgia's 5th congressional district, Lewis was a fighter by all accounts.
One of 10 siblings, his great grandfather was born into slavery.
He fought in high school and college to desegregate public libraries and lunch counters and with Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that King, a Civil Rights icon assassinated in 1968, led during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and spoke at the March on Washington in 1963 in spite of fears by then president John F. Kennedy that his speech might be too radical.
At 23-years-old he was the youngest speaker at the event in Washington, and gave a dynamic speech, pundits said, a speech overshadowed by Dr. King's historic "I Have A Dream Speech."
He was arrested for civil disobedience more than 44 times, 40 of those arrests occurring before he was elected to Congress.
In Congress he fought for Black people, women, poor people gay rights, and the disenfranchised, among others, and demanded public policy changes relative to Civil Rights and voting rights, housing, and a gambit of issues dear to him.
He despised racism, and sexism and promoted non-violent civil disobedience as a meaningful way to effectuate meaningful change in America.
His wife Lillian preceded him in death, though his only child, John Miles, survived him.
The National Museum of African American History opened on the National Mall in Washington D.C. in 2016 during Obama's tenure, Lewis the impetus for the congressional bill that led to funding for the historical monument.
Pictured is Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas Judge Wanda C. Jones, one of four Black judges, all of them women, on the general division common pleas bench of Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland
