Rep. John Lewis made his final trip to the U.S. Capitol on Monday, lying in state in the building where the “conscience of Congress” represented Georgia for over three decades as his former colleagues said farewell to the civil rights giant.
A military honor guard carried Lewis’ flag-draped coffin up the stairs en route to the Capitol Rotunda, where the 80-year-old became the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the rotunda.
Mourners inside were wore masks, with a good number of Congressional Black Caucus members wearing face coverings that said “good trouble” — the kind of trouble Lewis had spent his life advocating. “The action of Rosa Parks and the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble,” Lewis said in a 2015 speech.
Lewis’ body arrived at the Capitol after a procession through Washington, D.C., that included a stop at Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block stretch of 16th Street NW near the White House.
Lewis died on July 17 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
The longtime Georgia congressman, an advocate of nonviolent protest, was the last surviving speaker from the 1963 March on Washington. One of the original Freedom Riders, Lewis had his skull fractured by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965 in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
The confrontation between the troopers and the non-violent protesters led by Lewis helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Lewis’s former colleagues in the House of Representatives paid tribute to that legacy on Monday, renaming the revised voting rights act legislation they’d already passed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act.
“John worked on the bill for seven years,” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., told NBC News, and urged the Senate to pass it.
A public viewing was scheduled for 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET Monday. On Tuesday, the public viewing will be from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. ET. Masks will be required to enter the line, and social distancing will also be strictly enforced.
A private funeral is scheduled for Thursday in Atlanta.
