FRIDAY, JULY 31 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU A
JOHN LEWIS, 1940-
should be delayed because he did
not trust the efficacy of mail-in
voting, which millions of voters
have embraced as a safe way to
cast ballots amid the coronavirus
pandemic.
Speakers seized on those re-
marks to call for voters to stand
up against Trump administration
efforts to thwart mail ballots,
prompting Clinton to paraphrase
a prior tribute from a Lewis
friend.
“Keep moving to the ballot box,
even if it’s a mailbox,” Clinton
said.
Bush, speaking before Clinton
and Obama, praised Lewis’s life
story of rising from “Bloody Sun-
day” in Selma, where he was
beaten by state troopers in pro-
testing for voting rights, to the
halls of Congress. Without men-
tioning Trump by name, Bush
lauded his own and Lewis’s abili-
ty to maintain a good relation-
ship despite many deep political
differences.
“In the America John Lewis
fought for, and the America I
believe in, differences of opinion
are inevitable and evidence of
democracy in action. We the peo-
ple, including congressmen and
presidents, can have differing
views on how to protect our
union, while sharing the convic-
tion that our nation, however
flawed, is at heart a good and
noble one,” Bush said, eliciting
applause.
Lewis (D-Ga.), who served
more than three decades in Con-
gress, died July 17 at the age of 80.
He had pancreatic cancer.
The service, completing a near
week-long series of tributes from
Alabama to Washington, served
as an echo to the funeral of the
late senator John McCain (R-
Ariz.) after his death in August
2018, when a clutch of traditional
conservatives implored today’s
Republicans to reclaim their par-
ty from Trump’s “America First”
vision.
But at that service, as Bush and
Obama spoke at Washington’s
Washington National Cathedral,
Obama held back from forcefully
attacking the current president.
He did not hold back Thursday.
Obama connected Trump to
Wallace — the former Alabama
governor who led the segregation
movement — without ever saying
the current president’s name.
Obama accused the current
administration of “even under-
mining the Postal Service” as an
effort to block more voters from
participating in democracy.
Without naming his former vice
president, Obama signaled that
should voters elect Joe Biden and
give Democrats the Senate major-
ity, they should abolish the 60-
LEWIS FROM A
vote filibuster in the Senate to
advance voting rights.
“A Jim Crow relic,” the former
president said.
Obama delivered the eulogy at
a service marked by speeches,
songs, prayers and the tolling of a
bell. Speaker after speaker plead-
ed for Americans to carry on
Lewis’s legacy by voting in No-
vember.
Standing before Lewis’s flag-
draped casket, Obama told the
story of Lewis’s courage on his
first “freedom” ride on a bus, an
unofficial test taken with a Black
friend to set the stage for the
broader Freedom Ride protests
on segregated buses in the South.
“Imagine the courage of two
people Malia’s age, younger than
my oldest daughter, on their
own,” the former president said.
“John was only 20 years old. But
he pushed all 20 of those years to
the center of the table, betting
everything — all of it — that his
example could challenge cen-turies of convention and genera-
tions of brutal violence.”
Obama noted that the journey
to fulfill Lewis’s dream of a better
nation might be decades away,
but its foundation has been built
by the late congressman. “John
Lewis will be a founding father of
that fuller, fairer, better America,”
Obama said.
In his remarks, Clinton
knocked Trump’s recent asser-
tions that he might not accept the
November results if he loses,
retelling the story of how Lewis
accepted defeat to a more aggres-
sive activist, Stokely Carmichael,
to lead the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee in the
late 1960s. “We are here today
because he had the kind of char-
acter he showed when he lost an
election,” Clinton said to ap-
plause.
C linton noted that Lewis got in
one last posthumous word
through an essay published
Thursday — “marching orders,”he said — that discussed Lewis’s
last public appearance, at the
Black Lives Matter Plaza in Wash-
ington in June.
The New York Times, which
printed the essay, said it was
written shortly before Lewis’s
death and that he wanted it to be
published on the day of his funer-
al.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, the
officiant, started the service by
noting that amid “much political
cynicism and narcissism... here
lies a true American patriot.”
Warnock, the senior pastor of
the church once headed by King,
is the leading Democratic candi-
date for a November special elec-
tion for one of Georgia’s Senate
seats, a potential pickup that
would tip the majority away from
Trump’s Republicans.
In the days since Lewis’s death,
there have been renewed calls for
Congress to act on voting rights
and name the legislation in Lew-
is’s honor. In 2013, the SupremeCourt invalidated a crucial com-
ponent of the landmark law, rul-
ing that Congress had not taken
into account the nation’s racial
progress when citing certain
states for federal oversight. The
House passed legislation in De-
cember to restore those protec-
tions, but the bill has languished
in the GOP-led Senate.
M embers of Congress, family
members and the many speakers
attending the hours-long service
wore masks and sat at a distance
in the pews, precautions dictated
by the pandemic.
Obama recounted his final
conversation with Lewis, which
came two days before the con-
gressman’s appearance at BLM
Plaza in Washington. They had
just finished a Zoom town hall
with young activists and, over
their video connection, Lewis
told Obama how inspired he was
by this new crop of activists.
“John, those are your children,”
Obama recalled telling him.In his essay, Lewis noted that
he was admitted to the hospital
the day after visiting the plaza.
But, he said, “I just had to see and
feel it for myself that, after many
years of silent witness, the truth
is still marching on.”
Lewis recounted his work and
struggles in the early days of the
civil rights movement and urged
others to continue the fight to
“redeem the soul of America by
getting in what I call good trou-
ble, necessary trouble.”
“When historians pick up their
pens to write the story of the 21st
century, let them say that it was
your generation who laid down
the heavy burdens of hate at last
and that peace finally triumphed
over violence, aggression and
war,” he wrote. “So I say to you,
walk with the wind, brothers and
sisters, and let the spirit of peace
and the power of everlasting love
be your guide.”
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[email protected]Services end by invoking Lewis’s final ‘marching orders’
BRYNN ANDERSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In an op-ed published posthumously Thursday in the New York Times, Rep. John Lewis urged activists to “redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble.”BY MARC FISHERThree presidents spoke in po-
etry, paying tribute to a fallen
hero who believed — often
against evidence to the contrary,
including the cracking of his skull
by state troopers — that America
was good, its people driven by
love to do right by one another.
One president, the current
commander in chief, did not at-
tend the funeral of Rep. John
Lewis but instead spoke of dark
forces in the country and suggest-
ed that the United States not hold
its next presidential election on
time.
In a country cleaved by politi-
cal differences, paralyzed by a
pernicious virus and suffering
from a plunging economy, Thurs-
day presented painful contrasts.
It was a day of soaring tributes to
the first Black lawmaker to lie in
state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda,
offered from the pulpit of the
mother church of the modern
civil rights movement. And it was
a day of pointed reminders that
the nation is struggling, even
after 244 years, to define itself, to
decide what freedom and equali-
ty will mean.
Ninety-six days before Ameri-
cans select a path into an un-
known and fearsome future, the
nation’s last four chief executives
presented their visions of a coun-
try going through its toughest
year in half a century.
Barack Obama, George W.
Bush and Bill Clinton put on
masks and traveled to Atlanta’s
Ebenezer Baptist Church to say
goodbye to a civil rights leader
and Democratic House member
who preached change, progress
and hope. Donald Trump stayed
home, spending the morning
watching TV and tweeting, hold-
ing fast to his program of conflict,
nostalgia and restoration.
Not one of the three former
presidents mentioned his absent
successor, yet each seemed to
have him very much in mind:
“John Lewis always looked out-
ward, not inward,” Bush said.
Clinton said that Lewis “was
here on a mission that was bigger
than personal ambition.”
And Obama said of Lewis that
“he believed in us even when we
don’t believe in ourselves.” A few
minutes later, to hit that note
even harder, Obama said the very
same words, one more time.
The former presidents de-
ployed classic rhetoric — quota-
tions from Scripture, powerful
silences and sweet allusions to
Lewis’s grace and humility — to
describe how he earned a respect,
and therefore a power, for which
others shout in vain.
Trump turned to a classic, too
— to his own lifelong quest to put
himself at center stage.
In the morning, after his own
administration reported discour-
aging data showing that the econ-
omy had tanked in recent
months, contracting by a third on
an annualized basis because the
country had failed to get a handle
on the coronavirus, the president
scrambled to change the subject.
Sixteen minutes after the grim
numbers were released, he tweet-
ed for attention — all grievance,
all provocation, all CAPS.
“2020 will be the most INAC-
CURATE & FRAUDULENT Elec-
tion in history,” he proclaimed
with his 13,087th tweet since he
became president. “Delay the
Election until people can proper-
ly, securely and safely vote???”
A funeral for one of the last of
the great leaders of the civil rights
movement of the 1960s was no
place for campaign speeches, yet
Trump and his barely-camou-flaged disdain for the protesters
who have filled American streets
in recent months was a clear
subtext for many of the eulogies
at Lewis’s memorial service.
Obama, in particular, made the
point directly: “Bull Connor may
be gone. But today we witness
with our own eyes police officers
kneeling on the necks of Black
Americans. George Wallace may
be gone, but we can witness our
federal government sending
agents to use tear gas and batons
against peaceful demonstrators.”
Before a socially-distanced
congregation of 50 of Lewis’s
House colleagues and some of his
fellow civil rights pioneers, all
masked against the virus, Obama,
Clinton and House Speaker Nan-
cy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called on
Americans to honor Lewis’s opti-
mistic courage by “nonviolently
insisting on the truth,” as Pelosi
put it, and, above all, by voting.
The scene in the church where
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
once was pastor was unusually
universalist for a country so beset
by division. Speakers paid tribute
to Democrats and Republicans
alike who had fought for civil
rights. Obama praised both Bush
and his father for signing exten-
sions of the Voting Rights Act and
hailed Lewis for sticking to his
belief that he and his opponents
shared a foundational belief in
principles of equality and fairness.
“We must all keep ourselves
open to hearing the call of love,”
Bush said.
Obama hit the same theme: “In
all of us, there’s a longing to do
what’s right.” But sometimes, he
added, that longing is “taught out
of us. We start feeling as if, in fact,
we can’t afford to extend kind-
ness and decency to people. And
so often, that’s encouraged in our
culture.”He did not single out his suc-
cessor in the White House, nor
did he need to: Trump had been
asked days earlier whether he
would pay his respects to Lewis
by visiting his casket in the Capi-
tol Rotunda.
“No, I won’t be going, no,” the
president of the United States
said, his lips tight.
Trump has never been big on
funerals. He showed up late and
stood in the back at the service for
one of the most important people
in his life, his early mentor and
attorney, Roy Cohn. At his own
father’s funeral, Trump spoke
mainly of himself, listing his real
estate projects and noting that
Fred Trump had supported each
one.
He skipped the Capitol Rotun-
da honors for Sen. John McCain,
the Republican leader and former
prisoner of war in Vietnam, a
national hero for whom Trump
often expressed contempt.
“I gave him the kind of funeral
that he wanted,” Trump said after
that service. “I didn’t get a thank
you. That is okay. We sent him on
the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John
McCain.”
Trump’s speaking style might
have seemed out of place at the
Lewis funeral. But whether he
stayed away because he knew he’d
be unwelcome or because he con-
sidered Lewis an enemy, Trump’s
absence was in character: He has
always claimed to relish being on
the other side, excluded by the
establishment. Oppositional by
nature, he was elected to be the
great disrupter, and as president,
he has often been at odds with his
own government.
But although he was not in
Atlanta, his deep, almost physical
need to be the focus of attention,
to lure the camera back to him,
meant he was not about to sitquietly at the White House.
Trump’s suggestion that the
November election be postponed
because of the virus crisis seemed
less than full-throated. He ended
his tweet with question marks, a
move he reserves for moments
when he has perhaps gone too far,
when his lunge for attention
might backfire, or when, as in this
case, his proposal might be ille-
gal, on its face unconstitutional.
Trump’s gambit didn’t win the
usual plaudits. His dependable
allies in Congress were not jump-
ing off this particular cliff with
their president. They could read
the room, too.
“Never in the history of the
country, through wars, depres-
sions, and the Civil War have we
ever not had a federally sched-
uled election on time,” said Sen-
ate Majority Leader Mitch Mc-
Connell (R-Ky.), “and we’ll find a
way to do that again this Novem-
ber 3.”
Trump continued apace, tap-
ping out tweets embracing a Long
Island pizzeria owner who ticked
off some of his customers by
flying a Trump 2020 flag, and
vowing to “clear out... the Anar-
chists & Agitators in Portland.”
As Obama spoke in Atlanta and
on every major news channel, the
president counterprogrammed
by holding an unscheduled meet-
ing in the Oval Office with the
family of a soldier who was killed
on an Army base in Texas. Spec.
Vanessa Guillen’s mother and sis-
ters said Guillen was killed by a
fellow soldier who had sexually
harassed her. Trump called their
story “terrible” and said he would
“help” with their funeral expens-
es.
In midafternoon, Trump paid
tribute to Herman Cain, the for-
mer pizza chain executive and
Republican presidential candi-date whose death of covid-19 was
announced Thursday. Cain had
tested positive for the coronavi-
rus days after attending — un-
masked — a Trump campaign
rally last month in Tulsa.
But Trump remained silent
about Lewis, and by day’s end, he
was back to tweeting about the
election: “We are going to WIN
the 2020 election, BIG!”
John Lewis “played the long
game,” a member of his congres-
sional staff said at the funeral. He
expected people to live up to their
ideals. He saw in this spring’s
protests a new chance to bend the
arc of history.
In a final note he left behind to
be published on the day of his
funeral, Lewis called on “ordinary
people with extraordinary vision”
to “redeem the soul of America by
getting in what I call good trou-
ble, necessary trouble.” He called
the vote “the most powerful non-
violent change agent you have in
a democratic society,” and he ad-
monished Americans to “study
and learn the lessons of history.... The truth does not change.”
Late in the day, Trump ap-
peared at a hastily scheduled
coronavirus briefing, where he
rejected any move to shut down
businesses to curb the virus.
Asked how, in light of covid- 19
cases spreading among Major
League Baseball players, he could
assure parents that it is safe for
their children to return to school,
the president had only this to say:
“Can you assure anyone of any-
thing?”
Trump slammed his predeces-
sors’ “crazy, horrible, disgraceful ”
trade deals, complained that the
November election would be
“rigged” and made kind com-
ments about Cain.
He did not mention Lewis.
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As 3 ex-presidents honor a n icon, absent Trump suggests delaying election
ANALYSIS