DALLAS — She was powerful and poised.
A hard worker. A nurturer, an encourager, and a mentor.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson called Eddie Bernice Johnson the “lioness of Dallas.”
And House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York called her their “congressional mother.”
But the former congresswoman’s favorite title was Granny.
“She had the best way of being so fierce but so feminine. So powerful but dainty,” said grandson Dawrence Kirk Johnson, II. “And she is the pure epitome of class and elegance.”
Services for the retired congresswoman who died New Year’s Eve at the age of 89 attracted the most powerful politicians in the nation.
President Joe Biden attended her wake at Concord Church in Dallas on Monday.
Video messages from Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Bill Clinton played at her funeral in the same sanctuary on Tuesday.
“I’m so thankful I got the chance to get to know her, to get to work with her, and to become her friend,” Clinton said.
The three-and-a-half-hour funeral service was filled with stories of barriers being broken, lives being touched, and policy being changed by Eddie Bernice Johnson.
She was the first Black woman to hold any elected public office in Dallas.
Later she would become the first nurse and first Black Dallasite to serve in Congress.
She was only the third woman from Texas to represent the state in the U.S. House of Representatives.
She achieved great success out of deep segregation. Born in Waco in 1934, Johnson could not attend Baylor University because of her race.
She attended college outside the state of Texas but returned to become the Chief Psychiatric Nurse at the Dallas VA.
“She faced down the double-barrel shotgun of racism and sexism and became a barrier breaker and a difference maker,” said Rev. Freddie Haynes, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist church.
Johnson was well known for inspiring the next generation of Black leaders.
“I have the honor to stand before you as the highest-ranking Democrat in the United States Congress thanks to Eddie Bernice Johnson,” Jeffries said to applause.
He said she welcomed him to the Congressional Black Caucus when he was a freshman and never stopped mentoring him.
U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina met Johnson in 1972 and never stopped learning from her.
He called her quiet and gentle, “but strong as steel.”
“We loved Eddie Bernice Johnson and she loved us,” Clyburn said.
Dallas voters sent Johnson to the U.S. House in 1992 and re-elected her 15 times.
She retired in January 2023 as the longest-serving member of Texas’s congressional delegation.
Speaker after speaker addressed Johnson’s love of Dallas and Texas and her devotion to science, education, and her constituents.
“Everyone needs someone to believe in, and Eddie Bernice was my someone,” said Luci Baines Johnson, daughter of native Texan and former President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
She choked back tears as she described her “heroine.”
“Eddie Bernice Johnson was the uniter we needed in this divisive time,” she said. “The weight of her work feels too much to carry but carry we must.”
Dawrence Kirk Johnson Senior, the congresswoman’s son, offered gratitude to the city of Dallas for the outpouring of love his mother and his family have shown.
“I’m an only child but don’t feel it,” he said. “My mother has sons and daughters throughout this room and city.”
Johnson will be buried Wednesday at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.