Nation’s Capital Pays Respects to Civil-Rights Icon Rep. John Lewis

Mr. Lewis, who was jailed and beaten in his bid to win federal protection against voter suppression tactics, had cut a giant figure in the civil-rights movement and later in Congress. The youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, he was attacked by police in a 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., but preached humility and forgiveness. He urged young people to make “good trouble,” a phrase that his Democratic colleagues embroidered on the black masks they wore during a socially distanced ceremony around his casket.

Even as Mr. Lewis ailed from pancreatic cancer, Mrs. Pelosi noted, the congressman appeared at a Black Lives Matter protest in the nation’s capital and “summoned the strength to acknowledge the young people peacefully protesting and in the same spirit of that march taking up the unfinished work of racial justice.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who as a young congressional intern had watched the 1963 speeches, highlighted the role that Mr. Lewis had played in working to stamp out the injustices of segregation.

“History only bent towards what’s right because people like John paid the price to help bend it,” Mr. McConnell said. “He paid it in every jail cell where he waited out hatred and oppression. He paid that price in harassment and beatings from a bus station in South Carolina to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis lived and worked with urgency because the task was urgent. Even though the world around him gave him every cause for bitterness, he stubbornly treated everyone with respect and love.”

The invitation-only event occurred at a time of national hardship, with the country in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, gripped by deep partisan divides and in the shadows of social upheaval stemming in part from the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, while in the custody of police.

Mr. Lewis’s colleagues honored him largely without making any mention of their differences, including over House-passed legislation to restore tough enforcement provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court had scrapped in a 2013 decision that found the measures had outlived their relevance.

At one point, recorded remarks of Mr. Lewis were played, in which he spoke of meeting Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while still a teenager, saying they helped inspire him to fight for civil rights. In the remarks, made to graduates of Emory University in 2014, he told the students: “You must find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.” He added: “There may be some setbacks, some delays, some disappointments, but you must never, ever give up. Or give in,” he said.

The guests, all wearing masks and sitting in socially distanced chairs, stood and applauded when the recording concluded.

Mr. Lewis’s casket and members of the late congressman’s family were met by an honor guard as they arrived at Joint Base Andrews, just outside the capital, Monday morning. They were escorted into Washington for a funeral procession, pausing by the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial.

The motorcade also paused along Black Lives Matter Plaza, a newly named street near the White House that has been the epicenter of protests in Washington against racism and police brutality.

President Trump said he didn’t plan to visit the Capitol, but the memorial for Mr. Lewis was expected to draw some of the nation’s top politicians, officials and leaders. Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, were planning to pay their respects on Monday, as were presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife, Jill.

Write to Siobhan Hughes at siobhan.hughes@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications Rep. John Lewis died on July 17. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he died last week. (Corrected on July 27)