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      John Lewis remembered by Bryan Stevenson

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      How did you first meet?I first met John Lewis about 30 years ago at the airport in Atlanta. He came over and said: “You’re the young man representing people on death row.” And I said: “Yes, I am, and it’s such a thrill to meet you.” And he said: “I just want to encourage you to keep doing your important work.” It meant the world to me that he would do that. This was at a time when support for the kind of work I do was not very prevalent. That casual encounter just energised me for months.I was inspired by him long before I met him and I feel really privileged to have spent time with him in the last few years.How influential was he on your own activism?I grew up in a poor rural community. No one I knew had gone to college, very few people had graduated from high school. So I was fascinated by his growing up in Pike County, a rural community of sharecroppers. As a teenager, he imagined a life for himself that he actually hadn’t seen. He heard Dr King speaking on the radio and just wrote to him. And Dr King wrote back to him and invited him to Montgomery. That was incredibly inspiring to me.He was someone who carried that lived experience of segregation with him throughout his life.John Lewis had experienced the injustice and segregation in the Jim Crow era and it shaped his world view. That lived experience is very challenging to overcome. If you have actually seen those Whites Only signs, you understand that they were not directions, they were moral assaults that created real injuries. You damage people when you tell them they are not good enough to go through the front door, to marry someone of a different race, to attend school with white children, to be on the beach with white kids. That lived experience motivated him to fight injustice wherever he saw it.He was part of a generation that were incredibly courageous in terms of their dedication to non-violent direct action.He was courageous in ways that we rarely see. In the early 1960s, he was one of the original Freedom Riders and he was badly beaten by the police. Just two years later, in 1965, he was at the head of the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, being beaten and battered again. What a lot of people don’t appreciate is that he and his fellow protesters would put on their Sunday best to go to these places and then get on their knees and pray knowing that they were going to get battered and beaten and bloodied by the police. There was an absolute expectation of violence and yet they went. That is what was extraordinary about the courage of John Lewis and the generation he represents. What he and people like him did back then required an incredible commitment. It could have cost them their lives.How important was his Christian faith to his activism?It was incredibly important to him as it was to Dr King. They both knew that they shared a faith with many of the people that were oppressing and abusing them. They both believed that they had an obligation to challenge people who were dishonouring that faith because bigotry and segregation are contrary to Christianity and the Gospels. They saw themselves as committed Americans trying to push this country to live up to its values and ideas. In many ways they were the living proponents of what we now call liberation theology. They were protesting with a flag in one hand and a bible in the other.When John Lewis entered Congress, how important was that for you?Incredibly so. When I was a child, there were no black congressional members. We did not see people of colour in positions of power and influence. That all happened during the course of John Lewis’s life. You have to understand that in the United States, we have never had a real change in power. The people who sustained inequality and injustice, who turned their backs to thousands of black people being lynched, who did not intervene to end segregation are the people who are still in power. So, a black person being in Congress and advocating for racial justice as John Lewis did, is not easy. It is not comfortable.How would you sum him up?John Lewis was a visionary. He taught me that justice is a constant struggle, that we never really arrive, we have to always keep fighting against the things that are undermining equality and justice and to protect the things that represent equality and justice. He shared his incredibly generous spirit and his capacity for love and encouragement directly with me. He would always say: “Be brave, Bryan. Don’t let anyone cause you to not be brave.” That kind of affirmation is priceless. I can’t even articulate the value of it.He was courageous, committed and compassionate. And, he had an instinct for doing the things that had to be done, however challenging and uncomfortable. His life was remarkable and unparalleled in many ways. He inspired people to do difficult things in the service of justice. Very few people have done more to make the world a better place. Interview by Sean O’Hagan More

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      Minnijean Brown-Trickey: the teenager who needed an armed guard to go to school

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      When Minnijean Brown-Trickey looks back at old pictures of 4 September 1957, she remembers the day her courage kicked in. “I look at the photos of the nine of us, standing there, in contrast to those crazy people,” she says. “And what I say is that they threw away their dignity and it landed on us.”Brown-Trickey, now 79, was one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of African American children to go to the city’s Central high school in September 1957 – and in doing so, desegregate it. On the teenagers’ first day at the Arkansas school, white residents were so furious they amassed in a 1,000-strong mob at the gates. In preparation, eight of the teenagers had been instructed by Daisy Bates, the leader of the Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to meet at her house, so they could travel to the school in a group. But one of the nine, Elizabeth Eckford, had no telephone and so was not told of the safety plan. Instead she was forced to run the gauntlet of the mob’s hatred alone. The pictures of the young girl encountering the baying crowd is the enduring image of that day for many. But to Brown-Trickey, despite its power, it cannot completely capture all nine children’s fear. “Still photos cannot show how we are shaking in our boots, sandwiched between the Arkansas National Guard and a mob of crazy white people,” she says.As they tried to walk into school, the children were subject to verbal abuse, spat on and denied admission. Three black journalists watching were also attacked. One, L Alex Wilson, was hit on the head with a brick, developed a nervous condition and died three years later aged only 51.It took a further three weeks for the students to actually step inside the building, thanks to fierce resistance from the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, who used the mob as a pretext for barring the nine, putting the state’s National Guard in their way. Brown-Trickey recalls how he warned of “blood in the streets” should the children be allowed to go to school. More

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      Racial segregation on US inter-state transport to end – archive, 26 Nov 1955

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      Washington, November 25The Inter-state Commerce Commission ruled to-day that racial segregation on inter-state trains and passenger buses must end by January 10, 1956. It also ruled that segregation of inter-state travellers in public waiting-rooms is unlawful.These two rulings put an end to the “separate but equal” doctrine which had guided the commission’s rulings for many years. Two months after the commission was established in 1887 it had its first case on racial discrimination. It then held that segregation would be most likely to produce peace and order and to promote “dignity of citizenship” in the United States.In to-day’s opinion the commission said that “it is hardly open to question that much progress in improved race relations has been made since then.” When the Supreme Court outlawed compulsory segregation in state schools it ruled that segregation in itself excluded the concept of equality and imposed an inferior status on these American citizens. It is this new concept which has now prevailed with the commission.In to-day’s ruling the commission said:“The disadvantage to a traveller, who is assigned accommodations or facilities so designated as to imply his inherent inferiority solely because of his race, must be regarded under present conditions as unreasonable. Also, he is entitled to be free of annoyances, some petty and some substantial, which almost inevitably accompany segregation even though the rail carriers, as most of the defendants have done here, sincerely try to provide both races with equally convenient and comfortable cars and waiting rooms.”Commissioner Johnson, of South Carolina, in a dissenting opinion, said “It is my opinion that the commission should not undertake to anticipate the Supreme Court and itself become a pioneer in the sociological field.”Precautions in GeorgiaIt should be understood that to-day’s rulings apply only to travel between states. The rulings have no effect on travel within a Southern state. Mr Eugene Cook, Attorney-General for Georgia, said he would try to use all legal procedures to maintain racial segregation “on travel within Georgia itself.” He conceded the difficulties because it is often hard to separate inter-state travellers from those travelling within the state alone. However, he had asked his legal staff to study this problem while giving first priority to Georgia’s continued resistance to a unified public school system in the state.The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People also tried to have the commission end segregation in the lunch room at the Union Station in Richmond, Virginia. The commission said that this room was operated under lease by the Union News Company, which is not itself engaged in transportation, and therefore does not come within the commission’s jurisdiction. The commission also dismissed a complaint against the Texas and Pacific Railway Company because the evidence failed to show that the case involved inter-state travel.Ten years ago, the commission authorised Southern Railways to serve Negro passengers in the dining-car behind a curtain in seats reserved exclusively for them. This method of segregation aroused intense public criticism and it was finally outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1950. To-day’s rulings are a notable advance of those started by the Court in 1950. More

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      Obama, Bush and Clinton speak at funeral for congressman John Lewis – video

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      Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and House speaker Nancy Pelosi have delivered eulogies for congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. Hailing him as founding father for ‘a fuller, fairer, better’ America, Obama praised Lewis’s influence on his own path to the presidency. Clinton said Lewis believed ‘none of us will be free until all of us are equal’, while Bush said he lived in a better and nobler country because of the congressman

      Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy

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      Barack Obama: John Lewis fought for our highest ideals | Barack Obama

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      Barack Obama

      Barack Obama: John Lewis fought for our highest ideals

      Barack Obama

      In a transcript of his remarks at the congressman’s funeral, the former president calls on Americans to follow Lewis’s lead at a time of crisis

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      Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

      Representative John Lewis, a legendary civil rights leader and member of Congress, died of cancer on 17 July. In a eulogy at his memorial on Thursday, Barack Obama spoke about Lewis’s legacy, especially the importance of continuing his fight to protect voting rights. This is an abridged version of his remarks.
      James wrote to the believers: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.”
      It is a great honor to be back in Ebenezer Baptist church, in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple – an American whose faith was tested again and again to produce a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance – John Robert Lewis.
      I’ve come here today because I, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom.
      Now, this country is a constant work in progress. We were born with instructions: to form a more perfect union. Explicit in those words is the idea that we are imperfect; that what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than anyone might have thought possible. More

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      Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

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      During the funeral of congressman John Lewis, former US president Barack Obama delivered a powerful eulogy in which he praised the late civil rights icon, saying Lewis ‘will be a founding father of a fuller, fairer, better America’. 
      In his speech, Obama also received standing ovations for his indirect criticism of the Trump administration’s decision to send federal agents to peaceful demonstrations in Portland, and his condemnation of voter suppression tactics in the US
      Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy
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      Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy

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      Civil rights movement

      Former president called for Americans to fight Trump’s effort to undermine the right to vote in eulogy at congressman’s funeral

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      Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

      Barack Obama inspired a standing ovation with his soaring eulogy at the funeral on Thursday of civil rights icon John Lewis, hailing the late congressman as afounding father of “a fuller, better America” yet to be realized, while forcefully calling Americans to fight the Trump administration’s effort to undermine a cause Lewis was willing to die for: the right to vote.
      From the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached, Obama traced the arch of Lewis’s life – a child born into the Jim Crow south, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, a leader of the civil rights marches in Selma, and a US congressman from Georgia – tying his legacy to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, a black man under the knee of a white police officer. He then drew a line from the racist forces that opposed civil rights in the 1960s the policies and ideologies embraced by Donald Trump.
      “Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of black Americans,” Obama said, never mentioning his successor by name. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.”
      In perhaps his most explicitly political speech since leaving office, Obama assailed Trump’s false attacks on voting by mail, which Democratic officials have pushed to expand in light of the coronavirus pandemic. He called the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring a supermajority of the chamber to pass legislation, which Republicans used to block his agenda, “another Jim Crow relic”.
      Singling out members of Congress who issued statements calling Lewis a “hero” but oppose legislation that would restore the protections afforded under the Voting Rights Act Lewis struggled for in the 1960s, a law then granted under Lyndon Johnson but since weakened by a supreme court ruling in 2013, Obama said: “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”
      “Preach,” a voice rang out from the pews, where mourners sat apart in observation of safety protocols during the coronavirus pandemic. All those attending the service wore masks. More