WASHINGTON (AP) – The body of the late Rep. John Lewis has arrived in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, where he will lie in state as lawmakers pay tribute to the long-time Georgia lawmaker and icon of the civil rights movement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation Monday to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to greet Lewis’s flag-draped casket. Lewis’s motorcade stopped at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House as it wound through Washington before arriving at the Capitol, where the late congressman becomes the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the Rotunda. As with others afforded the honor, Lewis’s casket was rested atop the catafalque built for President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in 1865.
Pelosi and others will attend a private ceremony in the Rotunda before Lewis’s body is moved to the steps on the Capitol’s east side for a public viewing, an unusual sequence required because the COVID-19 pandemic has closed the Capitol to the public. Inside the Rotunda and outdoors, signs welcomed visitors with a reminder that masks would be required.
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who served in Congress alongside Lewis, is expected to visit the Capitol to pay his respects. The pair became friends over their two decades on Capitol Hill together and Biden’s two terms as vice president to Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Notably absent from the ceremonies was President Donald Trump, who publicly jousted with Lewis. Lewis once called Trump an an illegitimate president and chided him for stoking racial discord. Trump countered by blasting Lewis’s Atlanta congressional district as “crime-infested.” Trump said he would not go to the Capitol, but Vice President Mike Pence is scheduled to pay his respects later Monday.