ATLANTA (Reuters) – The life and legacy of longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis will be honored by three former presidents at his funeral on Thursday in Atlanta, capping a week of services and tributes to the civil rights pioneer.
Former President Barack Obama is scheduled to give the eulogy for Lewis, who died on July 17 at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are also slated to speak.
The funeral is set to begin at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) at Ebenezer Baptist Church, a historic church in Atlanta where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a leader of the Black civil rights movement, once preached. King was assassinated in 1968.
Lewis, an Alabama sharecropper’s son who strove for equality for Blacks in an America grappling with racial bigotry and segregation, was a fiercely determined champion of nonviolent protest and was inspired by King.
Lewis was first elected in 1986 to represent Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives. His death came at a time of reckoning across the United States over racial injustice, with widespread protests condemning unequal police treatment of Black Americans and institutions removing or renaming tributes to former leaders of the pro-slavery Confederacy.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; diting by Jonathan Oatis)
