John Lewis crosses Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma for final time

John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for the final time Sunday, as remembrances continued for the civil rights leader and congressman.

A native of Pike county, Alabama, Lewis died on 17 July aged 80, several months after announcing advanced pancreatic cancer.

The bridge became a landmark in the fight for racial justice when Lewis and other marchers were beaten there 55 years ago on Bloody Sunday, a key event in the fight for voting rights for African Americans.

On Sunday state troopers and police officers stood along barricaded sidewalks as Lewis’s body was carried across.

The casket of late John Lewis is carried outside the Brown Chapel AME Church, in Selma, Alabama. Photograph: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters

Frank and Ellen Hill had driven more than four hours from Monroe, Louisiana, to watch the procession. Frank Hill, 60, said he remembered watching footage of Lewis and other civil rights marchers being beaten.

“I had to come back and see John Lewis cross the bridge for the last time,” Hill told the Associated Press. “It’s funny to see the state troopers here to honor and respect him rather than beat the crap out of him.”

Calls to rename the bridge for Lewis are increasing.

On Sunday Kerry Kennedy, a human rights campaigner and daughter of the former US attorney general, senator and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, with whom Lewis forged a strong friendship, told the Guardian: “I think it would be great because Edmund Pettus was a terrible white supremacist and there should not be anything named after him.”

Alabama state troopers stand near the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

Pettus was a lawyer and Confederate general who became a US senator and leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

“It would be a symbol to Selma and to our country and to the world that we recognise the violence of the past,” Kennedy said, “and we are going to atone for it and we are on our way to becoming a more perfect union – one where all people are respected and where every person is treated with dignity.”

After the ceremonies in Selma, Lewis’s body was to be brought to the Alabama state capitol to lie in repose.

A series of events began on Saturday in Lewis’ hometown of Troy, Alabama. He will lie in state at the US Capitol in Washington next week before a private funeral on Thursday at the historic Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, which the Rev Martin Luther King Jr once led.