全美最瞩目的葬礼致辞！美国三位前总统齐聚民权领袖刘易斯的葬礼，奥巴马暗讽特朗普！（附视频&演讲稿）

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当地时间7月30日消息，美国政治家兼民权领袖约翰·罗伯特·刘易斯（John Robert Lewis）的葬礼在当日于亚特兰大的埃比尼泽浸信会教堂举行，尽管因为疫情到场人数被做了限制，很多座位都是空荡的，但参加者的分量却不低，三位美国前总统都到场，对享年80岁的前美国众议院民主党的领导人表达敬意，此外众议院议长南希·佩洛西（Nancy Pelosi）也出席了。

第44任美国总统，也是第一位非裔美国人总统贝拉克·奥巴马，在葬礼上发表了演讲，内容引发了格外关注。就在葬礼开始前几个小时，现任总统唐纳德·特朗普提出了推迟美国2020年大选的想法，他在社交媒体发文称，“2020大选会是有史以来最不准确和最具欺骗性的选举，这会让美国非常难堪，推迟选举，直到人们能够正确地、安全地投票”。

针对特朗普的发文，奥巴马不指名道姓地说：“一些当权者正在竭尽全力阻止人们投票”。奥巴马举例说出了阻止人们投票的方法，如关闭投票地点，严格限制身份来阻止一些学生和少数族裔，还称邮寄投票不合法等等。“你想尊重约翰吗？让我们通过振兴他誓死捍卫的法律来向他表示敬意”。此外奥巴马将特朗普与阿拉巴马州前州长乔治·华莱士相提并论，60年代华莱士曾发表了臭名昭著的“现在是隔离，永远是隔离”的言论。“乔治·华莱士可能已经走了，但我们依然可以目睹我们的联邦政府派遣特工使用催泪瓦斯和警棍对付和平示威者”。

第42任总统比尔·克林顿和第43任总统小布什也都出现在了葬礼现场，下个月满74岁的克林顿是独自一人前来的，而刚刚过完74岁生日的小布什则是和夫人劳拉·布什一同到达的。

克林顿和小布什也都发表了演讲，只是没有奥巴马那般言辞激烈。克林顿敦促美国人跟随刘易斯的步伐，“美国需要敬意，整装待发，继续前进”。而小布什则告诉送葬者们，“由于有了刘易斯，美国人才能生活在一个更好、更崇高的国家中”。

美国前总统奥巴马致悼词

奥巴马为约翰刘易斯致悼词

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President Obama: James wrote to the believers, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.” It is a great honor to be back in Ebeneezer Baptist Church in 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. Those who have spoken to Presidents Bush and Clinton, Madam speaker, Reverend Warnock, Reverend King, John’s, family, friends, his beloved staff, Mayor Bottoms.

President Obama: I’ve come here today because I like so many Americans, owe a great debt to John Lewis and his forceful vision of freedom. Now, 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 the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than any might’ve thought possible.

President Obama: John Lewis, first of the freedom riders, head of the student nonviolent 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 a boy from Troy. John was born into modest means. That means he was poor.

President Obama: 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 when he was supposed to help his brothers and sisters with their labor, he’d hide under the porch and make a break for the school bus when it showed up. His mother, Willie Mae Lewis, nurtured that curiosity in this scheisse serious child. “Once you learn 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, his father’s friends complained about the [claim 00:05:26]. 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 workshops on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience.

President Obama: John Lewis was getting something inside his head, an idea he couldn’t shake took hold of him, that nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were the means to change laws, but also change hearts, and change minds, and change nations and change the world. So he helped organize the Nashville campaign in 1960. He and other young men and women sat at a segregated lunch camp, well dressed, straight back, refusing to let a milkshake poured on their heads, or a cigarette extinguished on their backs, or a foot aimed at their ribs, refused to let that dent their dignity and their sense of purpose. And after a few months, the Nashville campaign achieved the first successful desegregation of public facilities in any major city in the South.

President Obama: John got a taste of jail for the first second, third, well, 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. And that same year, just 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 up front and refuse to move. This was months before the first official freedom riots. He was doing a test. The trip was unsanctioned, 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.

President Obama: Nobody was there to protect them. There were no camera crews to record events. Wait, sometimes, Rev, we read about this and we kind of take it for granted or at least we act as if it was inevitable. Imagine the courage of two people Malia’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 20 of those years to the center of the table, betting everything, all of it, that his example could challenge centuries of convention and generations of brutal violence and countless daily [indignitas 00:09:57] suffered by African Americans. Like John the Baptist preparing the way, like those old Testament prophets speaking truth to Kings, John Lewis did not hesitate. And he kept on getting onboard buses and sitting at lunch counters, got his mugshot taken again and again, marched again and again on a mission to change America.

President Obama: Spoke to a quarter million people at the march on Washington when he was just 23. Helped organize the freedom summer in Mississippi when he was just 24. At the ripe old age of 25, John was asked to lead the march from some-

President Obama: John was asked to lead the March from Selma to Montgomery. He was warned that Governor Wallace had ordered troopers to use violence, but he and Jose Williams and others led them across that bridge anyway. We’ve all seen the film, and the footage, and the photographs. President Clinton mentioned the trench coat, the knapsack, the book to read, the apple to eat, the toothbrush. Apparently, jails weren’t big on such creature comforts. And you look at those pictures, and John looks so young, and he’s small in stature, looking every bit that shy, serious child that his mother had raised, and yet he’s full of purpose.

President Obama: God’s put perseverance in him. And we know what happened to the marchers that day. Their bones were cracked by billy clubs, their eyes and lungs choked with tear gas. They knelt to pray, which made their heads easier targets, and John was struck in the skull, and he thought he was going to die surrounded by the sight of young Americans gagging, and bleeding, and trampled. Victims in their own country of state-sponsored violence. And the thing is, I imagine initially, that day, the troopers thought they’d won the battle. You can imagine the conversations they had afterwards. You can imagine them saying, “Yeah, we showed them.”

President Obama: They figured they’d turn the protestors back over the bridge, that they’d kept, that they preserved a system that denied the basic humanity of their fellow citizens. Except this time, there were some cameras there. This time, the world saw what happened, bore witness to black Americans who were asking for nothing more than to be treated like other Americans, who were not asking for special treatment, just equal treatment promised to them a century before, and almost another century before that.

President Obama: And when John woke up and checked himself out of the hospital, he would make sure the world saw movement that was in the words of scripture, “Hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not in despair. Persecuted, but not abandoned. Struck down, but not destroyed.” They returned the brown chap, a battered profit, bandages around his head. And he said, “More marchers will come now.” And the people came and the troopers parted. And the marchers reached Montgomery and their words reached the White House. And Lyndon Johnson, son of the South said, “We shall overcome.” And the Voting Rights Act was signed into law.

President Obama: The life of John Lewis was in so many ways acception. It vindicated the faith in our founding, redeemed that faith at most American of ideas, the idea that any of us ordinary people without rank, or wealth, or title, or fame can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation and come together and challenge the status quo. And decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest ideas. What a radical idea, what a revolutionary notion, this idea that any of us, ordinary people, a young kid from Troy can stand up to the powers and principalities and say, “No, this isn’t right. This isn’t true. This isn’t just. We can do better.”

President Obama: On the battlefield of justice, Americans like John, Americans like Reverend Lowry, C.T. Vivian, two other patriots that we lost this year liberated all of us, that many Americans came to take for granted. America was built by people like them. America was built by John Lewis-es. He, as much as anyone in our history, brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideas. And someday when we do finish that long journey towards freedom, when we do form a more perfect union, whether it’s years from now, or decades, or even if it takes another two centuries, John Lewis will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.

President Obama: And yet as exceptional as John was, here’s the thing. John never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country can do. I mentioned in the statement the day John passed, think about John, was just how gentle and humble he was. And despite this story to a remarkable career, he treated everyone with kindness and respect because it was innate to him. This idea that any of us can do what he did if we’re willing to persevere. He believed that in all of us there exists the capacity for great courage. That in all of us, there’s a longing to do what’s right. That in all of us, there’s a willingness to love all people and extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. So many of us lose that sense. It’s taught out of us. We start feeling as if, in fact, we can’t afford to extend kindness or decency to other people, that we’re better off if we’re above other people and looking down on them. And so often that’s encouraged in our culture. But John, he always saw the best in us and he never gave up and never stopped speaking out because he saw the best in us. He believed in us, even when we didn’t believe in ourselves. And as a Congressman, he didn’t rest. He kept getting himself arrested. As an old man, he didn’t sit out any fight. Sat in all night long on the floor of the United States Capitol. I know his staff was stressed, but the testing of his faith produced perseverance. He knew that the march is not over, that the race is not yet won, that we have not-

President Obama: The race is not yet won. That we have not yet reached that blessed destination, where we are judged by the content of our character. He knew, from his own life, that progress is fragile, that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history, of our own history, with their whirlpools of violence, and hatred, and despair that can always rise again.

President Obama: Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witnessed with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the run up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail in ballots so people don’t get sick.

Speaker 1: Preach.

President Obama: Now, I know this is a celebration of John’s life. There are some who might say we shouldn’t dwell on such things.

Speaker 1: Preach. Preach. Preach.

President Obama: But that’s why I’m talking about it. John Lewis devoted his time on this earth fighting the very attacks on democracy and what’s best in America that we’re seeing circulate right now. He knew that every single one of us has a God given power and that the fate of this democracy depends how we use it. That democracy isn’t automatic, it has to be nurtured, it has to be tended to, we have to work at it. It’s hard. And so, he knew that it depends on whether we summon a measure, just a measure, of John’s moral courage to question what’s right and what’s wrong and call things as they are. He said that, as long as he had a breath in his body, he would do everything he could to preserve this democracy. And, as long as we have breath in our bodies, we have to continue his cause. If we want our children to grow up in a democracy, not just with elections, but a true democracy, a representative democracy, and a big hearted, tolerant, vibrant, inclusive America of perpetual self-creation, then we’re going to have to be more like John. We don’t have to do all the things he had to do because he didn’t force. But we got to do something.

President Obama: As the Lord instructed Paul, “Do not be afraid. Go on speaking. Do not be silent, for I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.” It’s just everybody has got to come out and vote. We got all those people in the city, but they can’t do nothing. Like John, we’ve got to keep getting into that good trouble. He knew that nonviolent protest is patriotic, a way to raise public awareness, and put a spotlight on injustice, and make the powers that be uncomfortable. Like John, we don’t have to choose between protests and politics. It’s not an either, or situation. It’s a both, and situation. We have to engage in protest where that’s effective, but we also have to translate our passion and our causes into laws, institutional practices. That’s why John ran for Congress 34 years ago.

President Obama: Like John, we’ve got to fight even harder for the most powerful tool that we have, which is the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act is one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. That’s why John crossed that bridge. That’s why he spilled his blood. And, by the way, it was the result of Democratic and Republican efforts. President Bush, who spoke here earlier, and his father signed its renewal when they were in office. President Clinton didn’t have to because it was the law when he arrived. So, instead he made a law to make it easier for people to register to vote.

President Obama: But, once the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, some state legislators unleashed a flood of laws designed specifically to make voting harder, especially by the way, state legislators where there’s a lot of minority turnout and population growth. That’s not necessarily a mystery or an accident.

Speaker 2: Yes, sir.

President Obama: It was an attack on what John fought for. It was an attack on our democratic freedoms. And we should treat it as such.

Speaker 2: That right.

President Obama: If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy and work of all the congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And, by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn’t want us to stop there just trying to get back to where we already were.

President Obama: Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better by making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates, who’ve earned their second chance, by adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making election day a national holiday. So, if you are somebody who is working in a factory, or you’re a single mom who’s got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot. By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington D.C. and in Puerto Rico. They’re Americans. By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around. And, if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.

President Obama: Now, even if we do all this, even if every bogus voter suppression law is struck off the books today, we’ve got to be honest with ourselves that too many of us choose not to exercise the franchise. Too many of our citizens believe their vote won’t make a difference or they buy into the cynicism that, by the way, is the central strategy of voter suppression, to make you discouraged, to stop believing in your own power. So, we’re also going to have to remember what John said. “If you don’t do everything you can do to change things, then-”

President Obama: … you can do to change things. Then they will remain the same. You only pass this way once. You have to give it all you have. As long as young people are protesting in the streets, hoping real change takes hold… I’m hopeful, but we can’t casually abandon them at the ballot box. Not when few elections have been as urgent on so many levels as this one. We can’t treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time. We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy. And like John, we have to give it all we have.

President Obama: I was proud that John Lewis was a friend of mine. I met him when I was in law school. He came to speak. And I went up and I said, “Mr. Lewis, you are one of my heroes.” What inspired me more than anything as a young man was to see what you and [inaudible 00:34:30], Bob Moses, Diane Nash, others did. And he got that kind of, “Aw shucks, thank you very much.” Next time I saw him, I had been elected to the United States Senate. And I told him, “John, I’m here because of you.” And on inauguration day in 2008… 2009, he was one of the first people I greeted and hugged on that stand. And I told him, “This is your day too.”

President Obama: He was a good and kind and gentle man, and he believed in us even when we don’t believe in ourselves. And it’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was on Zoom. And I’m pretty sure neither he nor I set up the Zoom call because we didn’t know how to work it. It was a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who had been helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. And afterwards I spoke to John privately, and he could not have been prouder to see this new generation of activists standing up for freedom and equality. A new generation that was intent on voting and protecting the right to vote. In some cases, a new generation running for political office. And I told him, “All those young people, John, of every race and every religion, from every background and gender and sexual orientation, John, those are your children. They learned from your example. Even if they didn’t always know it.”

President Obama: They had understood through him what American citizenship requires, even if they had only heard about his courage through the history books. “By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” Dr. King said that in the 1960s, and it came true again this summer. We see it outside our windows in big cities and rural towns. In men and women, young and old, straight Americans and LGBTQ Americans, blacks who long for equal treatment and whites who can no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of their fellow Americans. We see it in everybody doing the hard work of overcoming complacency, of overcoming our own fears and our own prejudices, our own hatreds. You see it in people trying to be better, truer versions of ourselves.

President Obama: And that’s what John Lewis teaches us. That’s where real courage comes from. Not from turning on each other, but by turning towards one another. Not by sowing hatred and division, but by spreading love and truth. Not by avoiding our responsibilities to create a better America and a better world, but by embracing those responsibilities with joy and perseverance, and discovering that in our beloved community, we do not walk alone. What a gift John Lewis was. We are all so lucky to have had him walk with us for a while and show us the way. God bless you all. God bless America. God bless this gently soul who pulled it closer to its promise. Thank you very much.

美国前总统克林顿致悼词

克林顿为约翰刘易斯致悼词

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Bill Clinton: Thank you very much. First, I thank John-Miles and the Lewis family and John’s incomparable staff for chance to say a few words about a man I loved for a long time. I’m grateful Pastor Warnock, to say it in Ebeneezer, a holy place, sanctified by both the faith and the works of those who have worshiped here. I thank my friend, Reverend Bernice King, who stood by my side and gave a fascinating sermon in one of the most challenging periods of my life.

Bill Clinton: I thank President and Mrs. Bush, President Obama. Speaker Pelosi, thank you and representative Hoyer and Representative Clyburn, who I really thank for with the stroke of a hand ending an intrafamily fight within our part, proving that peace is needed by everyone. Madame Mayor, thank you. You have faced more than a fair share of challenges in these last few months and you have faced them with candor and dignity and honor and I thank you for your leadership.

Bill Clinton: I must say for a fella that got a start speaking to chickens, John’s gotten a pretty finely organized and orchestrated and deeply deserved send-off this last week. His homegoing has been something to behold. I think it’s important that all of us who loved him, remember that he was, after all, a human being, a man like all other humans, born with strengths, that he made the most of when many don’t, born with weaknesses that he worked hard to beat down when can’t, but still a person. It made them more interesting and it made him, in my mind, even greater.

Bill Clinton: Twenty years ago, we celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Selma March and we walked together along with Coretta and many others from the movement who are no longer with us. We are grateful for Annie Young and Reverend Jackson and Diane Nash, and many others who survive. But on that day, I got him to replay for me a story he told me when we first met back in the 1970s. I said, “I was just an aspiring whatever Southern politician and hadn’t been elected governor and he was already a legend.”

Bill Clinton: So John, what’s the closest you ever actually came to getting killed doing that. And he said, “Well, once we were at a demonstration and I got knocked down on the ground and people were getting beat up pretty bad and all of a sudden I looked up and there was a man holding a long, heavy piece of pipe and he lifted it and was clearly going to bring it right down into my skull. At the very last second I turned my neck away and then the crowd pushed him a little bit. A couple of seconds later, I couldn’t believe I was still alive.” I think it’s important to remember that. First, because he was a quick thinker. And secondly, because he was here on a mission that was bigger than personal ambition. Things like that sometimes just happen but usually they don’t.

Bill Clinton: I think three things happened to John Lewis long before we met and became friends that made him who he was. First, the famous story of John at four with his cousins and siblings holding his aunt’s hand more than a dozen of them, running around a little old wooden house, as the wind threatened to blow the house off its moorings, going to the place where the house was rising and all those tiny bodies trying to weigh it down. I think he learned something about the power of working together. Something that was more powerful than any instruction.

Bill Clinton: Second, nearly 20 years later when he was 23, the youngest speaker and the last speaker at the March on Washington, when he gave a great speech urging people to take to the streets across the South, to seize the chance to finally end racism. He listened to people that he knew, had the same goal say, “Well, we have to be careful how we say this because we’re trying to get converts, not more adversary.” Just three years later, he lost the leadership of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael because he said, “You know, I’d really…” I think it was a pretty good job for a guy that young and to come from Troy, Alabama, it must have been painful to lose, but he showed as a young man there are some things that you cannot do to hang on to a position, because if you do them, you won’t be who you are anymore. I say there were two or three years there, where the movement went a little bit too far towards Stokely, but in the end, John Lewis prevailed. We are here today because he had the kind of character he showed when he lost an election.

Bill Clinton: Then there was Bloody Sunday. He figured he might get arrested and this is really important not to, for all the rhapsodic things we all believe about John Lewis, he had a really good mind and he was always trying to figure out how can I make the most of every single moment? So he’s getting ready to march from Selma to Montgomery. Wants to get across the bridge. What do we remember? He made kind of quite a strange figure. He had a trench coat and a backpack. Now young people would probably think that’s no big deal, but there weren’t that many backpacks back then and you never saw anybody in a trench coat looking halfway dressed up with a backpack. But John put an apple, an orange, a toothbrush, toothpaste in the backpack take care of his body because he figured he would get arrested. And two books, one a book by Richard Hofstadter on America’s political tradition to feed his mind. And one, the autobiography of Thomas Merton, a Roman Catholic Trappist monk, who was the son of itinerant artists making an astonishing personal transformation.

Bill Clinton: What’s a young guy who’s about to get his brains beat out and planning on going to prison and doing, taking that? I think he figured that if Thomas Merton could find his way and keep his faith and believe in the future, he John Lewis could too.

Bill Clinton: So we honor our friend for his faith and for living his faith, which the scripture says is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. John Lewis was a walking rebuke to people who thought, “Well, we ain’t there yet and we’ve been working a long time. Isn’t it time to bag it?” He kept moving. He hoped for and imagined and lived and worked and moved for his beloved community. He took a savage beating on more than one day and he lost that backpack on Bloody Sunday. Nobody really knows what happened to it. Maybe someday someone will be stricken with conscience and give some of it back. But what it represented, never disappeared from John Lewis’ spirit.

Bill Clinton: We honor that memory today because as a child, he learned to walk with the wind, to march with others to save a tiny house. Because of the young man, he challenged others to join him with love and dignity, to hold America’s house down and open the doors of America to all its people. We honor him because in Selma on the third attempt, John and his comrades showed that sometimes you have to walk into the wind along with it, as he crossed the bridge and marched into Montgomery. But no matter what, John always kept walking to reach the beloved community. He got into a lot of good trouble along the way, but let’s not forget, he also developed an absolutely uncanny ability to heal trouble waters. When he could have been angry and determined to cancel his adversaries, he tried to get converts instead.

Bill Clinton: He thought the open hand was better than the clenched fist. He lived by the faith and promise of Saint Paul. Let us not grow weary in doing good for in due season, we will reap if we do not lose heart. He never lost heart. He fought the good fight. He kept the faith but we got our last letter today on the pages of the New York Times; keep moving. It is so fitting on the day of his service. He leaves us our marching orders. Keep moving.

Bill Clinton: Twenty years ago when I came here after the Selma March to a big dinner honoring John and Lillian and John-Miles, you had a big Afro and it wasn’t really pretty and your daddy was giving you grief about it and I said, “John, let’s, don’t get old too soon. I mean, if I had hair like that, I’d have it down on my shoulders.”

Bill Clinton: But on that night, I was almost out of time and people were to be present and people were asking me, “Well, if you could do one more thing, what it would be, or what do you wish you had that you had done that you didn’t?” And all that kind of stuff. Someone asked me that night because I had many friends in Atlanta and I said, “If I could just do one thing. If God came to me tonight and said, ‘Okay, your time’s up. You got to go home and I’m not a genie. I’m not giving you three wishes.’ One thing, what would it be?”

Bill Clinton: I said, “I would infect every American was whatever it was that John Lewis got as a four year old kid and took through a lifetime to keep moving and keep moving in the right direction and keep bringing other people to move and to do it without hatred in his heart, with a song and be able to sing and dance.” As John’s brother Freddie said in Troy, keep moving to the ballot box even if it’s a mailbox and keep moving to the beloved community.

Bill Clinton: John Lewis was many things but he was a man. A friend and sunshine in the storm. A friend who would walk the stony roads that he asked you to walk. That would brave the chastening rods he asks you to be whipped by, always keeping his eyes on the prize, always believing none of us will be free until all of us are equal.

Bill Clinton: I just loved him. I always will and I’m so grateful that he stayed true to form. He’s gone up yonder and left us with marching orders. I suggest since he’s close enough to God to keep his eye on the sparrow and us, we salute, suit up and march on.

美国前总统小布什致悼词

小布什为约翰刘易斯致悼词

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Good morning. Distinguished guest, John Miles, Lewis family and friends. Lauren, I thank you for inviting us to be here today. John’s story began on a tiny farm in Troy, Alabama, place so small he said you could barely find it on the map. Dr. talked about the chickens. I did a little research. Every morning, he would rise before the sun to tend to the flock of chickens. He loved those chickens. Already called to be a minister who took care of others. John fed them and tended to their every need, even their spiritual ones, for John baptized them. He married them and he preached to them.

When his parents claimed one from family supper, John refused to eat one of his flock. Going hungry was his first act of nonviolent protest. He also noted in later years that his first congregation of chickens listened to him more closely than some of his colleagues in Congress. John also thought that chickens were just a little more productive. “At least they produced eggs”, he said. From Troy to the sit-ins of Nashville from the Freedom riots to the March on Washington, from Freedom Summer to Selma, John Lewis always looked outward, not inward. He always thought of others. He always believed in preaching the gospel, in word and in deed, insisting that hate and fear had to be answered with love and hope. John Lewis believed in the Lord, he believed in humanity and he believed in America. He’s been called an American saint, a believer willing to give up everything, even life itself, to bear witness to the truth that drove him all his life, that we could build a world of peace and justice, harmony, and dignity, and love.

And the first crucial step on that journey was the recognition that all people are born in the image of God and carry a spark of the divine within them. Laura and I were privileged to see that spark in John up close. We worked with him to bring the National museum of African American History and Culture to the Washington Mall. He was instrumental in the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act which I signed to seek resolution in cases where justice had been too long denied. And we will never forget joining him in Selma, Alabama for the 50th anniversary of his march across the Edmund Pettus bridge, where we got to watch President Barack Obama thank John as one of his heroes.

There’s a story in the old scriptures that meant a lot to John. In the Hebrew Bible, the Lord is looking for a prophet. Whom shall I send, God wonders and who will go for us? Isaiah answers, here am I, send me. John Lewis heard that call a long time ago in segregated Alabama. And he took up the work of the Lord through all his days. His lesson for us is that we must all keep ourselves open to hearing the call of love, the call of service, and the call to sacrifice for others.

Listen, John and I had our disagreements, of course, but in the America John Lewis fought for, and the America I believe in, differences of opinion are inevitable elements and evidence of democracy in action. We, the people, including congressmen and Presidents, can have different views on how to perfect our union while sharing the conviction that our nation, however flawed, is at heart a good and noble one. We live in a better and nobler a country today because of John Lewis and his abiding faith in the power of God, in the power of democracy, and in the power of love to lift us all to a higher ground. T.

he story that began in Troy isn’t ending here today, nor is the work. John Lewis lives forever in his Father’s house and he will live forever in the hearts of Americans who act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God. May the flights of angels see John Lewis to his rest and may God bless the country he loved.

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