Donald Trump refused to praise the late John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and original Freedom Rider, during his latest one-on-one interview, and also questioned the value of the pivotal Civil Rights Act of the 1960s, which Lewis fought and almost died for. When asked how history would remember the civil rights leader, the president replied, “I don’t know. I really don’t know” and brought the point back around to himself.“I never met John Lewis, I don’t believe,” Trump said. In the interview, released late on Monday, with the Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, Trump instead centered his view of the late congressman on their lack of a personal relationship, noting Lewis “chose not to come to [his] inauguration”.“He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches, and that’s OK,” he said. “That’s his right. He should’ve come. I think he made a big mistake.”The interview was conducted as the Georgia congressman lay in state in the Capitol rotunda. Trump did not pay his respects while Lewis’s casket was in Washington, nor attend Lewis’s funeral in Atlanta last week, at which Barack Obama delivered a soaring eulogy that was personally poignant but also a barnstorming political attack on the Trump administration’s efforts at voter and protest suppression. Flags on federal buildings were ordered to be flown at half-staff for less than a full day to mark Lewis’s death. Lewis, the son of sharecroppers and a youth activist who rose to represent Georgia’s fifth congressional district for decades, died of advanced pancreatic cancer last month at the age of 80. Before serving in Congress, Lewis spent years as a pioneering activist in the civil rights movement, marching with Martin Luther King and nearly dying in the 1965 attack on marchers in Alabama known as Bloody Sunday. Before that, Lewis challenged segregation on interstate bus services as a Freedom Rider in 1961.

All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/04/donald-trump-civil-rights-leader-john-lewis


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