John Lewis : President Obama's Eulogy

James wrote to the believers, considerate it as pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. That perseverance finish its work so that you maybe mature and complete.

It is a great honor to be back at Ebenezer Baptist Church from 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.

To those who have spoken, to presidents Bush and Clinton, Mrs Speaker,... I have come here today, because, like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom. Though 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, is to take up unfinished work of the last and carry it further any might have thought possible.

John Lewis, first of the freedom riders, head of the student non-violent coordinating committee, youngest speaker at the March on Washington, leader of the March from Selma to Montgomery, member of Congress, representing the people of this State, and this District for 33 years, mentor to young people, including me at the time, until his final day on this earth. He not only embraced that responsibility, but he made it his life's work. Which isn't bad...for...

John was born with 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 he was supposed to help his brothers and sisters with their labor, he's hide under the porch, and make a break for the school bus when it showed up.

As a mother, Willy Mae Lewis, nurture that curiosity in this shy, serious child. Once you learned something, she told her son, once you get something inside your head, no one can take it away from you. As a boy, John listened through the door after bedtime as his father's friends complain about the Klan... One Sunday as a teenager, he heard Dr. King preach on the radio. As a college student in Tennessee, he signed up for Jim Lawson's workshop on the tactic of non-violence and civil disobedience.

John Lewis was getting something inside his head. An idea he couldn't shake, took hold on him. That non-violence and civil disobedience were means to change laws, but also change hearts, change minds and change nations, and change the world.

So, he helped to organize the national campaign in 1960. He and other young men and women sat on a segregated lunch counter. Well-dressed, straight back, refusing to let a milk shake poured on their heads or cigarettes extinguished on their backs or a foot aimed at their ribs, refuse to let that bent their dignity and their sense of purpose.

And, after a few months the national campaign achieved the first successful desegregation of public facilities in any major city in the South. John get a taste of jail, for the first, second, third... whatever...several times. 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, 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 upfront and refused to move. This was months before the first official Freedom Riders. He was doing a test... triples on sanctions...few knew what they were up to.

And, at every stop through the night, apparently the angry driver stormed out of the bus and into the bus station. And, John and Bernard had no idea what he might come back with or who he might come back with. Nobody was there to protect them, there were no camera crews to record events...

We... you know, sometimes, we read about this and we kind of take it for granted or at least we act as if it was inevitable. I imagine the courage of two people, of Malea'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 twenty of those years to the center of the table. Betting everything, all of it! That his example, could challenge centuries of conventions and generations of brutal violence and countless daily indignities suffered by African-Americans.

Like John the Baptist, preparing the way. By those old testament prophets talking truth to kings. John Lewis did not hesitate, and he kept on getting on more buses and sitting on lunch counters, got his mugshot taken again, and again... marched again and again...on a mission to change America.