Barack Obama praises John Lewis as ‘a man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance’ – live

Earlier today, the entire Washington-based federal appeals court said it would in August take up the Justice department’s request to dismiss the criminal case against Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

A three-judge panel of that court last month ordered the case dismissed in a 2-1 ruling, but this move could undo the decision.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. He also cooperated with the special counsel Robert Mueller as he took over the investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.

Obama is now on a rush about the importance of voting. “We have to be honest with ourselves that too many of us do not exercise the right to franchise,” Obama said.

He says cynicism is a prime tactic used by those who want to keep people from voting.

Obama has used the eulogy to call for election day to be a national holiday, for Washington DC and Puerto Rico to get statehood, for there to be automatic voter registration and possibly doing away with the “Jim Crow relic” filibuster.

“He was a good and kind and gentle man and he believed in us, even when we don’t believe in ourselves,” Obama said.

Obama concludes the eulogy: “What a gift John Lewis was. We are all so lucky to have had him walk with us for awhile and show us the way. God bless you all, God bless America, God bless this gentle soul who pulled it closer to his promise.”

Judging by the rousing applause from the crowd, the eulogy was very well-received. Obama puts his face mask on before exiting the church with his secret service detail.

“Bull Connor might be gone but today with our own eyes we witness police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans,” Obama says in the eulogy.

“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 be able to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision. Even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick” Obama said.

“I know this is a celebration of John’s life, there are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things. But that’s why I am talking about them. John has devoted his time on this earth to the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America, we’re seeing circulate right now.”

“He knew that every single one of us has a god given power and that the fate of this democracy depends on how we use it,” Obama said. “That the fate of this democracy is not automatic.”

Obama advises people to vote. “We don’t have to choose between protest and politics, it’s a both/and situation.”

If politicians want to honor Lewis, Obama says, “there is something better than a statement calling him a hero. Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”

“The life of John Lewis was in so many ways exceptional. It vindicated the faith in our founding, redeemed that faith. That most American of ideas, the idea that any of us ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame can someone point out the imperfections of this nation and come together and challenge the status quo and decide that it is in our power to remake this country.”

He brought this country “closer to our highest ideals,” Obama says.

“John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.”

Obama says he knows later in Lewis’s life, his staff was stressed by thing like his overnight sit-in in Congress.

“He kept getting himself arrested,” Obama says. “As an old man, he didn’t sit out any fight.”

Obama speaks about Lewis’s work in the Civil Rights movement, including the Nashville sit-in campaign and as one of the first Freedom Riders.

“Sometimes we read about this and we kind of take it for granted. Or at least we act as if it was inevitable, imagine the courage of two people Malia’s age – younger than my oldest daughter – on their own to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression. John was only 20-years-old, but he pushed all of those 20 years to the center of the table, betting everything…”

Obama continues to emphasize the youth of Lewis when he took on such difficult battles.

“At the ripe old age of 25, John was asked to lead the march from Selma to Montgomery,” Obama said. “He was warned that governor Wallace had ordered troopers to use violence.”

Lewis has said he thought he was going to die that day, when law enforcement knocked him to the ground and struck him on the head, beating him and leaving him with a skull fracture.

Obama gets an enthusiastic response from the audience after saying: “The troopers thought they had won the battle.”

Obama said Lewis made sure that after he woke up from the hospital the public would see a movement that, quoting scripture, was: “hard pressed on every side but not crushed, perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not abandoned, struck down but not destroyed.”

Barack Obama begins by describing John Lewis as a “man of pure joy and unbreakable perseverance.”

“I’ve come here today because I like so many Americans owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom,” Obama said.

“This country is a constant work in progress. We’re born with instructions to form a more perfect union, explicit in those words is the idea that we’re imperfect. That what gives each new generation purpose it to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than any might have thought possible.”

“John was born into modest means, that means he was poor. In the heart of the Jim Crow south to parent’s who picked somebody else’s cotton. Apparently he didn’t take farmwork. On days when he was supposed to help his brother and sisters with their labor, he’d hide under the porch and make a break for the school bus when it showed up.”

Jennifer Holliday is singing Take My Hand, Precious Lord, after a string of tributes were delivered at John Lewis’s funeral. After her song, Barack Obama is scheduled to deliver the eulogy.

Before this song, Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is officiating the memorial service, read a letter from president Jimmy Carter, who could not attend the ceremony.

Civil rights leader, Xernona Clayton, said when people read about “this wonderful man” in the newspapers, to honor him by acting in accordance with the values he fought for. She concluded her tribute by telling people to vote.

Bill Campbell, Atlanta’s former mayor, said he first met Lewis 40 years ago, when he came to his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina as an activist. Campbell’s father was the president of the local chapter of the NAACP.

“John Lewis wasn’t on the right side of history, history was on the right side of John Lewis,” Campbell said.

Campbell said in his last visit to Lewis, the congressman told him to make sure people vote in this election, because it is the most important ever.

Jamila Thomspon, Lewis’s deputy chief of staff, said the congressmen would want her to tell the crowd that they look “good” and “beautiful.”

“He got all into our business,” Thompson said, laughing. “And was there in spirit or in person for the big moments.”

Lewis’s niece, Sheila Lewis O’Brien, said: “Let’s continue this celebration of life by taking up the top he has now laid down and endeavor to get into good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Christine Pelosi, House majority speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, posted photos of the memorial book for the service. The book is embossed with Lewis’s quote: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”

John Lewis’s funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta

Hogan Gidley, the national press secretary for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, said the president was “raising a question” in a Tweet earlier this morning about delaying the election because Democrats have promoted mail-in voting during the pandemic.

“They are using coronavirus as their means to try to institute universal mail-in voting, which means sending every registered voter a ballot whether they asked for one or not,” Gidley said in a statement.

The Guardian US’s voting rights team, editor Ankita Rao and reporter Sam Levine, have done some really excellent work about Donald Trump’s ongoing assault on mail-in voting. That context is very useful today

Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said these assaults could have a chilling effect, in this deeply-reported piece examining why these attacks are taking place. “President Trump is using his bully platform to try to discourage people from voting and to try to stop people from voting by mail,” Garcia said.

There is also significant concern about his attacks on mail-in voting which downplay the threat of coronavirus. In this article, Levine clarifies this and the Trump campaign’s other misleading claims about mail-in voting.

And this piece is a very important reminder that the presidential election results will not be ready the night of the election.

Reverend James Lawson Jr, an activist and teacher in nonviolent action, said he has read a lot of books about the Civil Rights movement. “Most of the books are wrong about John Lewis,” Lawson said.

Lawson said the malignancy of racism is what moved himself, Lewis and other activists – prominent and less prominent – in the Civil Rights movement. “Many of us had no choice but to do, what we had to do,” Lawson said.

Lawson disputed the more measured remarks made by the politicians who spoke just before him. Lawson said:

We do not need bipartisan politics if we are going to celebrate the life of John Lewis. We need the constitution of the United States to be alive.

Lawson said to honor Lewis, people must commit to not be quiet “as long as our nation continues to be the most violent culture in the history of humankind,” and as long as “our economy is shaped by plantation capitalism.”

Lawson ends by quoting Langston Hughes’s I Dream a World:

I dream a world where no human, no other human will scorn. Where love will bless the earth and peace its path adorn. I dream a dream where all know sweet freedoms way, where greed no longer saps the soul nor avarice blights our day. A world I dream where black and white and yellow and blue and green and red and brown, whatever your race may be will share the bounties of the earth. And where everyone woman and man and boy and girl is free. Where wretchedness hangs it head Where wretchedness will hang its head and joy, like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind – of such I dream, my world!

Meanwhile in Washington DC, Republican senators are facing questions about the president’s suggestion to delay the election. There is pretty widespread rejection of the comments – even in his own party.

The visibly emotional House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, listed the other Congress members in attendance at John Lewis’s memorial service, including representatives Bill Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina, and Steny Hoyer, a Democrat from Maryland, who like Pelosi has worked with Lewis for thirty years.

Pelosi says Lewis was “so revered” in Congress and referenced Lewis leading the Democrats sit-in demanding action in gun control.

She said while being great at politics, he was also funny and mischievous.

“He loved to dance, he loved to make us laugh, sometimes while he was dancing,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi said once her granddaughter asked Lewis if he was ever asked to sing during the Civil Rights movement. And Lewis told her they asked him to sing solo, solo so they couldn’t hear him. That got some laughs from the crowd.

Pelosi concluded: “We always knew he worked on the side of the angels, and now he is with them.”

At the podium, Bill Clinton makes a special mention of Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Atlanta mayor who has been sued by Georgia’s governor because she put a mask mandate in place in the city. Clinton acknowledged that Bottoms, who is at the service, has faced obstacles lately. “You have faced them with candor and dignity and honor,” he said.

Clinton, like Bush, reflected on Lewis’s work while Clinton served as president.

“John Lewis was a walking rebuke to people who thought well, we ain’t there yet, we have been working a long time, isn’t it time to bag it? He kept moving.”

“No matter what, John always kept walking to reach the beloved community,” Clinton said. “He got into a lot of good trouble along the way, but let’s not forget he also had an absolutely uncanny ability to calm troubled waters.”

Clinton referenced an essay Lewis recently wrote, and submitted to the New York Times two days before he died, requesting it be published on the day of his funeral. Clinton said: “It’s so fitting on the day of his service, he leaves us his marching orders: keep moving.”

The church’s senior pastor, reverend Raphael Warnock, welcomed three presidents to the service.

In attendance was George W Bush, who he noted was president “last time we renewed the voting rights act,” Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Bush spoke first at the funeral, relating a story Lewis told him about his family’s chickens, who he cared for so deeply that he preached to them. Bush said Lewis also noted the chickens were much more productive than Congress. “At least they produced eggs,” Lewis told Bush.

“He’s been called an American saint, a believer willing to give up everything,” Bush said of Lewis.

Bush acknowledged the two occasionally disagreed, adding: “In the America John Lewis fought for, and the America I believe in, differences in opinion are evidence of Democracy in action.”

Reverend Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr, just delivered a prayer at John Lewis’s funeral. “We praise you, oh God, for this non-violent warrior,” King declared.

In the prayer, King implored Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which includes voting protections Lewis spent his life defending and seeking to restore after they were taken away by the supreme court seven years ago. She also called for an end to the school-to-prison pipeline and other social justice causes Lewis campaigned for in his life.

“Grant us, dear god, a double portion to get in to Good Trouble until white supremacy around the world is uprooted and dismantled,” King said.

The funeral for civil rights leader John Lewis has just begun at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

The church’s senior pastor, reverend Raphael Warnock, is leading the service, which has dozens of attendees who are keeping social distance and wearing masks.

“Here lies a true American patriot,” Warnock said.

This morning, the New York Times published a powerful essay Lewis submitted two days before he died from pancreatic cancer at age 80.

The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington writes:

The essay rehearses several of the key moments that for Lewis shaped his life in non-violent protest and what he called “good trouble”. He said he was inspired into the movement against America’s brutal history of race discrimination by the lynching in Mississippi of Emmett Till, aged 15, in 1955 – when Lewis was himself just 14.

“Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor,” he writes.

He recalls how in his childhood in Alabama, the white supremacist threat was a fact of everyday life. “Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare.