Friday, March 29, 2024

‘I Stood on His Shoulders’: Barack Obama Remembers and Tributes John Lewis

Obama - John Lewis - medal Getty)
President Obama presents John Lews with the Presidental Medal of Freedom in 2011 (Getty)

*On Saturday, former President Barack Obama gave props to now late Congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis and his “enormous impact” on America’s history.

Obama recollected that his election as the first Black president was possible because of the sacrifices of John Lewis.

“I first met John when I was in law school, and I told him then that he was one of my heroes. Years later, when I was elected a U.S. Senator, I told him that I stood on his shoulders,” Obama wrote in a statement following Lewis’ death. “When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made.”

Obama said Lewis “never stopped providing wisdom and encouragement to me” and former first lady Michelle, and their family. “We will miss him dearly,” he said.

RELATED: The Congressional Black Caucus Mourns the Loss of Congressman John Lewis

As we reported, Lewis, a Democrat who served as the US representative for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, died Friday at the age of 80 after a six-month battle with cancer.

He was a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s, a keynote speaker at the historic 1963 March on Washington, and helped lead a march in 1965 for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he and other marchers were brutally beaten by police.

Lewis had described attending Obama’s 2009 inauguration as an “out-of-body” experience.

“When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought — I never dreamed — of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected president of the United States,” he said at the time.

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