'America was built by John Lewises': Obama delivers a rousing eulogy at the civil rights icon's funeral.
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."
John was born into modest means. That means he was poor. In the heart of the Jim Crow South, to parents who picked somebody else’s cotton. Apparently he didn’t take to farm work. On days when he was supposed to help his brothers and sisters with their labor, he’d hide under the porch and make a break for the school bus when it showed up. His mother, Willie Mae Lewis, nurtured that curiosity in this shy, serious child.
But he also got a taste of victory, and it consumed him with righteous purpose. And he took the battle deeper into the South. That same year, just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of interstate bus facilities was unconstitutional, John and Bernard Lafayette bought two tickets, climbed aboard a Greyhound, sat up front and refused to move. This was months before the first official Freedom Rides. He was doing a test. Trip was unsanctioned. Few knew what they were up to.
John was struck in the skull, and he thought he was gonna die, surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging and bleeding and trampled. Victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence. And the thing is, I imagine initially, that day, the troopers thought they’d won the battle. You can imagine the conversations they had afterward, you can imagine them saying ‘Yeah, we showed them.
I mention in the statement the day John passed, the thing about John was how gentle and humble he was, and despite his storied, remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him. This idea that any of us can do what he did if we’re willing to persevere. He believed that in all of us there exists the capacity for great courage.
It’s just, everybody’s got to come out and vote. We got all those people in the city, but they can’t do nothing. Like John, we got to keep getting into that good trouble. He knew that nonviolent protest is patriotic, a way to raise public awareness and put a spotlight on injustice and make the powers that be uncomfortable. Like John, we don’t have to choose between protest and politics. It’s not an either-or situation, it’s a both-and situation.
Even if we do all this, even if every bogus voter suppression law is struck off the books today, we gotta be honest with ourselves that we choose not to exercise the franchise. Too many of our citizens believe their vote won’t make a difference, or they buy into the cynicism — that, by the way is the central strategy of voter suppression — to make you discouraged, to make you stop believing in your own power.
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