THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 Y A
WASHINGTON — When the
honor guard placed Representa-
tive John Lewis’s coffin in the Cap-
itol Rotunda on Monday, the civil
rights icon’s body lay upon the
same catafalque that President
Abraham Lincoln’s did.
It was a fitting tribute: The
raised box that once supported
the president most responsible for
ending slavery now carried the
first Black lawmaker to lie in state
in the Rotunda, a man who dedi-
cated his life to ensuring that with
freedom came equality.
“Under the dome of the U.S.
Capitol, we have bid farewell to
some of the greatest Americans in
our history,” Speaker Nancy
Pelosi said during an emotional
ceremony Monday afternoon to
honor Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Demo-
crat who endured numerous ar-
rests and beatings in his lifelong
push for civil rights. “It is fitting
that John Lewis joins this pan-
theon of patriots.”
Speakers recalled Mr. Lewis’s
remarkable rise in American life,
from a farmhouse in Pike County,
Ala., with no running water or
electricity to his leading role in the
effort to end segregation and his
ascent to the halls of Congress.
Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the majority leader, in-
voked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., a friend of Mr. Lewis’s,
who once said that “the arc of the
moral universe is long, but it
bends toward justice.”
“But that is never automatic,”
Mr. McConnell said. “History only
bent toward what’s right because
people like John paid the price to
help bend it.”
Typically, when a lawmaker
with the stature of Mr. Lewis is
honored in the Capitol, the build-
ing hosts thousands of visitors.
But the coronavirus pandemic
limited the crowd inside the Ro-
tunda to about 100.
The crowd was mostly a cross-
section of influential lawmakers
from both parties, including sev-
eral potential Democratic vice-
presidential picks, along with a
few other notable guests. Mem-
bers of the Congressional Black
Caucus wore masks that read
“Good Trouble” — a nod to one of
Mr. Lewis’s favorite phrases en-
couraging people to stand up
against injustice.
During Ms. Pelosi’s remarks,
she played parts of Mr. Lewis’s
2014 commencement address at
Emory University in Atlanta in
which he implored students to
“find a way to get into trouble —
good trouble, necessary trouble.”
One notable absence from the
commemoration events was Pres-
ident Trump, who told reporters
he had no plans to attend the cere-
mony for Mr. Lewis, whom he had
criticized in recent years.
“I won’t be going, no,” Mr.
Trump said.
Vice President Mike Pence,
however, was expected to pay re-
spects, according to his public
schedule, as did Joseph R. Biden
Jr., the presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee.
Several lawmakers were
brought to tears by the vocal artist
Wintley Phipps, who sang the
Christian hymns “Amazing
Grace” and “It Is Well.”
Before the ceremony, a solemn
crowd gathered outside the build-
ing to watch the motorcade carry-
ing Mr. Lewis arrive.
“Come on — you don’t want to
miss it,” June Jeffries, 66, said as
her son, Rudolph, hoisted her
barefoot granddaughter, Clara,
onto his shoulders to see the mo-
torcade turn into the Capitol com-
plex.
“My wife and I are explaining to
her, particularly for her, what it
means to be Black,” said Mr. Jef-
fries, who lives in Silver Spring,
Md. “This is the type of event we
wouldn’t miss.”Both Ms. Jeffries and her son
remembered the cold day they
spent outside the Supreme Court
to pay homage to Thurgood Mar-
shall, its first African-American
justice, after his death. On Mon-
day, even in sweltering heat, the
pair felt it was important for Clara,
4, to do the same.
“I want my daughter to under-
stand she’s part of this community
and that she has a responsibility
as a member of this community to
participate in these kinds of
events,” he added. “Appreciate the
people who made it possible for us
to live as freely as we do.”
Debra Long-Doyle, 65, a retired
assistant U.S. attorney, said she
could not miss paying her re-
spects, even amid a pandemic. So
she biked from her Capitol Hill
home wearing a face mask.
Ms. Long-Doyle said Mr. Lewis
had been an inspiration in her life
through “everything that he’s
done for us and for Black people
for our country.”
“When you march, when you do
things like getting people to vote,taking people to the polls, making
sure their rights are being upheld,
you honor John Lewis,” Ms. Long-
Doyle said. “The struggle contin-
ues, and I want to make sure that I
live up to his legacy by doing ev-
erything I can to make sure that
everybody’s rights are re-
spected.”
Mr. Lewis spent only a few
hours lying in state under the Cap-
itol dome after the invitation-only
ceremony on Monday afternoon.
On Monday evening, his coffin
was moved outside to the Capitol
steps, and members of the public
lined up — with masks required
and social distancing enforced —
to view it from the plaza below.
The public viewing of Mr. Lew-
is’s coffin will continue all day
Tuesday. Mr. Lewis’s family dis-
couraged people from traveling
from out of town to the Capitol
amid the pandemic, instead ask-
ing for “virtual tributes” using the
hashtags #BelovedCommunity or
#HumanDignity.
Mr. Lewis, who as a 17-term con-
gressman was the senior memberof the Congressional Black Cau-
cus, died July 17 after battling pan-
creatic cancer.
He was known as the “con-
science of the Congress” for his
moral authority acquired through
years of protest for racial equality
— including when he was brutally
beaten during voting rights dem-
onstrations in Selma, Ala., in 1965
and across the Jim Crow South.On Sunday, he made his final jour-
ney across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge in Selma, his coffin carried
by a horse-drawn caisson past the
spot where a state trooper wield-
ing a club fractured his skull 55
years ago.
Last year, Representative Eli-
jah E. Cummings became the firstBlack lawmaker to lie in state in
the Capitol, though he was hon-
ored in Statuary Hall, not in the
Rotunda, where presidents and
other statesmen have lain. The
site is reserved for the nation’s
most revered figures, most re-
cently including President
George Bush and Senator John
McCain, Republican of Arizona.
Rosa Parks, the civil rights pio-
neer, lay in honor there in 2005, re-
ceiving the highest honor afforded
to a private citizen.
During the ceremony Monday,
the Rev. Grainger Browning Jr. of
Ebenezer African Methodist Epis-
copal Church in Fort Washington,
Md., said he believed Mr. Lewis
had now joined two of his friends,
Mr. Cummings and Dr. King, in the
afterlife.
“When he got there, Elijah
Cummings and the congressional
cloud of witnesses welcomed him
home,” Mr. Browning said. “We
heard Dr. King in the background
saying, ‘Free at last, free at last,
the conscience of the Congress is
free at last.’ ”Lewis Is Honored in Capitol as Part of ‘Pantheon of Patriots’
The coffin of Representative John Lewis was carried into the Capitol on Monday. Mr. Lewis became the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESBy LUKE BROADWATEREmily Cochrane contributed re-
porting.
A crowd, limited by a
pandemic, was largely
filled with lawmakers.
WASHINGTON — The Educa-
tion Department’s civil rights
chief has for 40 years labored to
enforce civil rights protections in
the nation’s schools and universi-
ties, but few have attracted as
much attention as Kenneth L.
Marcus, who will leave the post
this week after two years marked
by dissension, disputes — and sig-
nificant accomplishments.
Mr. Marcus, who came to the job
as a fierce champion for Israel and
a critic of anti-Zionist movements
on college campuses, is credited
with overseeing the completion of
sexual misconduct rules and ex-
panding civil rights for Jewish
students amid rising anti-
Semitism. In announcing his de-
parture, he said he had restored
the office’s status “as a neutral,
impartial civil rights law enforce-
ment agency that faithfully exe-
cutes the laws as written and in
full, no more and no less.”
But in recent months, two sepa-
rate complaints that have been
filed accuse Mr. Marcus of abus-
ing his authority by forcing
through cases that furthered his
personal and political agenda. In
January, a former lawyer in the
Office for Civil Rights said Mr.
Marcus forced employees to in-
vestigate a policy that allowed
transgender athletes in Connecti-
cut to compete on female sports
teams, even though the lawyers
questioned the merits of the case.
In another complaint filed in
May with the department’s in-
spector general, nine civil rights
groups said Mr. Marcus gave pref-
erential treatment to a conserva-
tive Zionist group with close per-
sonal ties to him when he re-
opened a settled anti-Semitism
case against Rutgers University.
More broadly, Mr. Marcus was
accused of using the office to fulfill
a longstanding goal of recognizing
Jewish students as a protected
class under civil rights laws, while
undermining policies that
shielded other minority popula-
tions from discrimination. He pub-
licly boasted that one of his first
acts in office was rescinding
Obama-era guidelines on how
schools could use affirmative ac-
tion to increase diversity in their
programs.
And last fall, he moved to elimi-
nate critical categories of civil
rights data that the federal gov-
ernment collects from schools,
like preschool enrollment by race,
while proposing to broaden cate-
gories that he has long held inter-
est in, like religious harassment.
“What we saw with Ken Marcus
was a misuse of the office to fur-
ther marginalize marginalized
people,” said Liz King, the pro-
gram director for education at the
Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights, which joined
dozens of groups in opposing Mr.
Marcus’s confirmation.
“It is clear that he was never
neutral,” Ms. King added. “Ken
Marcus’s civil rights agenda was
always his own, and students paid
dearly for his time in office.”
Mr. Marcus, who was confirmed
to lead the office in June 2018, is
perhaps best known for resurrect-
ing a complaint against Rutgers
University, in which he unilater-
ally adopted a disputed definition
of anti-Semitism that includes op-
position to the state of Israel and
asserted the department’s right to
treat Judaism as a national origin.His decision to reopen the com-
plaint, which had been dismissed
by the Obama administration,
caused an uproar among Palestin-
ian rights and higher education
groups, which had long fought Mr.
Marcus’s efforts to squelch stu-
dent calls for boycotting, divest-
ing from and imposing sanctions
on Israel.
The Rutgers case emboldened
Mr. Marcus to push similar inves-
tigations into national origin at
other high-profile universities, in-
cluding whether Jewish students
were discriminated against in ad-missions processes. His efforts
were widely seen as the ground-
work for an executive order to
combat anti-Semitism on college
campuses.
Susan B. Tuchman, the director
of the Center for Law and Justice
at the Zionist Organization of
America, which filed the Rutgers
complaint, said Mr. Marcus raised
awareness that colleges were not
effectively responding to har-
assment of Jewish students.
“Mr. Marcus let publicly funded
schools know that they could no
longer justify Israel-bashing that
was a mask for Jew hatred,” Ms.
Tuchman said.
The complaint to the inspector
general requested an investiga-
tion into whether Mr. Marcus had
broken the office’s protocol by
personally overseeing the Rut-
gers complaint, saying he had vio-
lated his “obligation of impartial-
ity.” In 2012, Mr. Marcus wrote an
“open letter” to the president of
Rutgers criticizing the universi-
ty’s response to claims of anti-
Semitism. The complaint included
data that showed that as civil
rights chief, Mr. Marcus bypassed
more than 400 older appeals to
embrace the Zionist Organization
of America’s.
Zoha Khalili, a staff lawyer of
Palestine Legal, one of the groups
that filed the complaint, said the
matter should still be investi-
gated, though Mr. Marcus is leav-
ing. The groups said his decision
led to a “a growing influx” of “in-
vestigations targeting advocacy
and scholarship on Palestinian
rights.”
“We have a long road ahead to
undo the damage that he and the
rest of the administration have
done,” she said.
Andrew Getraer, the executive
director of Rutgers Hillel, said not
much came of the investigation.
“Symbolically, it was worth-
while to finally have the depart-
ment acknowledge what had been
done,” he said. “But it was an an-
nouncement, and then it faded
away.”
Mr. Marcus was applauded by
some civil liberties groups for thecompletion of rules for how
schools and colleges should re-
spond to sexual misconduct under
Title IX, the federal law that pro-
hibits sex discrimination. Those
rules bolstered the rights of ac-
cused students and narrowed li-
ability for schools.
“Ken Marcus has been one of
the only bright spots for me in this
administration, as a conserva-
tive,” said Linda Chavez, who
oversees the Center for Equal Op-
portunity, a conservative research
group.
But a former lawyer in the civil
rights office said Mr. Marcus also
used the civil rights law to further
the Trump administration’s roll-
back of transgender rights.
The lawyer, Dwayne Bensing,
filed a whistle-blower complaint
with the Office of Special Counsel
outlining how Mr. Marcus pres-
sured his employees to rush a
complaint filed last June by the Al-
liance Defending Freedom, a con-
servative Christian conservative
group. The group claimed that
Connecticut policy allowing trans-
gender athletes to compete on fe-
male sports teams amounted to
sex discrimination against wom-
en.
Last August, when the alliance
announced that the Education De-
partment had opened the com-
plaint, Mr. Bensing said he investi-gated how such a complex case
had been established so quickly.
Mr. Bensing said lawyers ques-
tioned whether the department
had jurisdiction because Title IX
protected students from being
treated differently on the basis of
their sex, while transgender ath-
letes and other girls were being
treated the same. He said when he
saw an email trail with Mr. Mar-
cus’s name in it, he was alarmed.
“The entire case processing
manual went out the window, and
Ken Marcus’s fingerprints were
all over it,” Mr. Bensing said in an
interview.
That August, two days before
the department notified the Alli-
ance Defending Freedom that its
complaint would be investigated,
a civil rights enforcement director
told staff members they “must
have a draft for Ken’s review to-
morrow,” according to emails re-
viewed by The New York Times.
A staff lawyer complied with an
order to send a letter to the group
on Aug. 7 notifying them the case
had been opened, but said her
team would “appreciate a discus-
sion about the legal theory and,
much simpler, the time frame/
scope of the investigation.” On
Aug. 8, after the letter was issued,
the enforcement director ordered
members of the team to start
drafting a request for data, sayingthey would “talk in the future
about the precise legal framework
to apply.”
After Mr. Bensing revealed the
correspondence to The Washing-
ton Blade, Mr. Marcus ordered an
investigation of the disclosures.
Mr. Bensing confessed, and said
he faced retaliation and left the de-
partment in January. His whistle-
blower complaint, first reported
by HuffPost, was dismissed. In
May, the department ruled that
policies in Connecticut that allow
transgender students to partici-
pate in athletics based on gender
identity violate federal civil rights
law.
“They just interpreted the law
the way they wanted to, and more
than that, they used those inter-
pretations to attack people,” Mr.
Bensing said. “As a former civil
servant, my fear is that this ad-
ministration, and Ken Marcus in
particular, has tarnished the repu-
tation of our government so much
that no one is ever going to have
any faith in how our federal gov-
ernment interprets our civil rights
protections ever again.”
Mr. Marcus declined to discuss
the complaints against him, but
Education Department officials
defended his handling of the Rut-
gers and Connecticut cases
against what they called “recy-
cled claims” by organizations op-
posed to Mr. Marcus’s “longstand-
ing work to fight anti-Semitism.”
Other matters “relate to ongo-
ing enforcement matters on which
we cannot comment,” the depart-
ment said in a statement, continu-
ing, “We would note that all of the
claims amount to criticism that
Assistant Secretary Marcus has
been overly vigorous in his oppo-
sition to various forms of discrimi-
nation.”
The department said that Mr.
Marcus’s resignation was not con-
nected to the complaints.
On July 9, Mr. Marcus said on
Twitter that he was returning to
private life. The next day, the Lou-
is D. Brandeis Center, the Jewish
civil rights group he oversaw be-
fore joining the administration,
announced that he would return
as chairman of its board on Aug. 1.After 2 Years, Education Dept.’s Civil Rights Chief Steps Down Amid Controversy
Kenneth L. Marcus oversaw the completion of sexual miscon-
duct rules and the expansion of civil rights for Jewish students.SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESSBy ERICA L. GREENA tenure marked by
dissension, disputes
and accomplishments.