TROY, Ala. (CNN) — A six-day memorial ceremony honoring the late Rep. John Lewis, a towering figure of the civil rights movement and longtime Georgia Democrat, will commence on Saturday, featuring stops in five cities that played key roles in his life and legacy.
A military honor guard will escort Lewis’ body across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma — where Lewis helped lead a march to Montgomery, Alabama, for voting rights in 1965 — and when he lies in state in Montgomery; Washington, DC; and Atlanta, according to a schedule from Lewis’ family.
The “Celebration of Life” ceremony, which will be livestreamed on several platforms, will also feature events in Troy, Alabama, where Lewis was born on a cotton farm into a segregated America in 1940, and at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which marked the start of the march to Montgomery.
Lewis, who served as the US representative for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, was widely seen as a moral conscience of Congress because of his decades-long embodiment of nonviolent fight for civil rights. His passionate oratory was backed by a long record of action that included, by his count, more than 40 arrests while demonstrating against racial and social injustice.