More than 1,000 people gathered outside a historic Atlanta church to pay their last respects to longtime U.S. Representative John Lewis as former presidents praised the civil rights pioneer at his funeral on Thursday. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton both spoke of Lewis's humble beginnings on a farm in Troy, Alabama, to becoming a leader of the Black civil rights movement and ultimately the man known as the "conscience of Congress." They spoke in front of the American flag-draped casket bearing Lewis' body at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Once preached. King, a mentor to Lewis in the civil rights struggle, was assassinated in 1968. "We live in a better and nobler country today because of John Lewis," said Bush, who remembered joining Lewis in Selma, Alabama, for the 50th anniversary of the watershed march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Source: The Star July 30, 2020 16:30 UTC