The casket carrying John Lewis crosses the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died decades ago in his fight for voting rights. Follow live updates:
The casket of Rep. John Lewis is carried by horse-drawn carriage over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on July 26. Brynn Anderson/AP
The death of Rep. John Lewis has renewed calls to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, after the civil rights icon who himself did not see the renaming as necessary. In 2015, a proposal to rename the bridge failed in the Alabama state legislature, the Montgomery AdvertiserPrior to the legislation, Lewis said the original name of the bridge was"a decision for the people of Alabama to make" and that"you can change the name of the bridge but you cannot change the facts of history," the congressman said in a statement at the time, according to theFormer NAACP president and CEO Cornell William Brooks told CNN today that Lewis' stance on...
"I think it had everything to do with his, not just his political humility, but a moral humility. John Lewis understood profoundly that the sacrifice of Selma was more than the heroic sacrifice of a person but the heroic sacrifice of many people, a community, a race," Brooks said Sunday following Lewis' final march across the bridge.
At age 25, Lewis helped lead the 1965 march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other marchers were met by heavily armed state and local police who brutally beat them with clubs, fracturing Lewis' skull. The day became known as"Bloody Sunday" and galvanized Americans’ support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
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