The late Rep. John Lewis was carried across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the civil rights leader helped lead a march for voting rights in 1965, for a final goodbye.
The Sunday event was part of a six-day memorial ceremony honoring Lewis, who died on July 17 after succumbing to stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
Lewis’s body traveled on a horse-drawn caisson through downtown Selma until it reached the base of the bridge where the Georgia Democrat was carried across alone. Once crossed, family members and Alabama state troopers greeted Lewis’s body on the other side.
The state troopers are among the officers who clashed with protesters 55 years ago on the same bridge, according to CNN. The day Lewis and other marchers crossed that bridge later became known as “Bloody Sunday” and was a landmark event in gaining U.S. support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. The march has been re-enacted many times on its annual spring anniversary.
Lewis served as a U.S. representative for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District for over three decades and was known for his civil rights activism. He will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol on Monday and Tuesday after his death last weekend.
