John Lewis was a Civil Rights icon who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, nearly losing his life for marching for voting rights for black Americans. Elijah Cummings was a civil rights advocate and the first black man in Maryland history to be named Speaker Pro Tempore, the second highest position in the House of Delegates.
These two men are not the same person, but you couldn’t convince Republicans of that on the day that the world lost Rep. John Lewis.
.@SenDanSullivan that is not Congressman John Lewis. pic.twitter.com/MJ6kwswIZt
— Dr. Al Gross (@DrAlGrossAK) July 18, 2020
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) posted a photo of himself posing next to John Lewis in a tweet honoring the late congressman and hero. Except it wasn’t John Lewis. Instead, it was a photo of Elijah Cummings. As awful as that is, he wasn’t even the first Republican lawmaker of the day to make the mistake.
One has to wonder how two men who worked in the same building, attended the same events, and purport to be friends with both Lewis and Cummings could possibly confuse the two. Both were great men, both worked their way up from impoverished childhoods to the United States Congress and worked to ensure equal rights for people of color. But the two men are just that, two separate men. Somehow, Dan Sullivan and Marco Rubio cannot seem to keep that straight, even in a post honoring the life of John Lewis.
Twitter was, by then, extremely frustrated with the GOP’s offensive tweets about Rep. Lewis. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image screenshot via YouTube
