Remembering : Rome to hold vigil for Rep. John Lewis at Town Green today
♦ A community candlelight vigil for the late congressman is set for Tuesday.
The community is invited to a candlelight vigil honoring Congressman John Lewis at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday at the Town Green.
“Help us honor this man and help us celebrate a great life,” Rome Mayor Bill Collins said. “He exemplified walking the walk and talking the talk.”
Lewis died July 17 at 80, months after he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death.
“I’m so appreciative of his great work,” Collins said.
Dr. Joshua Murfree will be the keynote speaker at the Town Green gathering, which will also include portions of the adjacent Forum River Center, Collins said.
A series of events began Saturday in Lewis’ hometown of Troy, Alabama, to pay tribute the late congressman and his legacy. They’ll end with his private funeral Thursday at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church.
“Congressman Lewis is a true American icon. He was a gentleman being Floyd even and County who an in had difficult exceptional Commission a calming times,” human Chair presence said Scotty for not Hancock. using violence “I respect to spread him his message.”
In a solemn display of bipartisan unity Monday, congressional leaders praised Lewis as a moral force for the nation in a Capitol Rotunda ceremony rich with symbolism and punctuated by the booming, recorded voice of the late civil rights icon.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Lewis the “conscience of the Congress” who was “revered and beloved on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of the Capitol.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell praised the longtime Georgia congressman as a model of courage and a “peacemaker.”
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Mcconnell, a Republican, said, quoting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “But that is never automatic. History only bent toward what’s right because people like John paid the price.”
Born to sharecroppers during Jim Crow segregation, Lewis was beaten by Alabama state troopers during the civil rights movement, spoke ahead of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington and was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the nation’s first Black president in 2011.
Dozens of lawmakers looked on Monday, several wiping tears, as Lewis’ flag-draped casket sat atop the catafalque built for President Abraham Lincoln and as the late congressman’s voice echoed off the marble and gilded walls. Lewis is the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the Rotunda.
“You must find a way to get in the way. You must find a way to get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble,” Lewis declared in an Emory University commencement address in Atlanta. “Use what you have … to help make our country and make our world a better place, where no one will be left out or left behind . ... It is your time.”
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus wore masks with the message “Good Trouble,” a nod to Lewis’ signature advice and the COVID-19 pandemic that has made for unusual funeral arrangements.
The ceremony was the latest in a series of public remembrances. Pelosi met his casket earlier Monday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, and Lewis’ motorcade stopped at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House as it wound through Washington before arriving at the Capitol.
Following the Rotunda service, Lewis’ body was moved to the steps on the Capitol’s east side for a public viewing, an unusual sequence required because the pandemic has closed the Capitol to the public.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who served in Congress alongside Lewis, is expected to pay his respects. The pair became friends over their two decades on Capitol Hill together and Biden’s two terms as vice president to President Barack Obama, who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Notably absent from the ceremonies was President Donald Trump. Lewis once called Trump an illegitimate president and chided him for stoking racial discord. Trump countered by blasting Lewis’ Atlanta congressional district as “crimeinfested.”
Trump said he would not go to the Capitol, but Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to pay his respects later Monday.