Congressman John Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence, was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality and then carried a mantle of moral authority into the Congress.
When Lewis was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in December of 2019, he vowed to fight it with the same passion with which he had battled racial injustice, saying “I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life.” He passed away on July 17, 2020 at the age of 80.
On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Lewis was a valiant, courageous stalwart of the civil rights movement. Lewis’s personal history paralleled that of the civil rights movement. He was among the original 13 Freedom Riders, the Black and white activists who challenged segregated interstate travel in the South in 1961. He was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated lunch-counter sit-ins. He helped organize the March on Washington, where Dr. King was the main speaker, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
On March 7, 1965, he led one of the most famous marches in American history – demanding the voting rights they had been denied, Lewis marched with 600 others partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a waiting phalanx of state troopers in riot gear. Televised images of the beatings of Lewis and scores of others outraged the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson presented to a joint session of Congress eight days later and signed into law on Aug. 6. A milestone in the struggle for civil rights, the law struck down the literacy tests that Black people had been compelled to take before they could register to vote and replaced segregationist voting registrars with federal registrars to ensure that Black people were no longer denied the ballot.
While Lewis represented Atlanta, his natural constituency was disadvantaged people everywhere. Known less for sponsoring major legislation than for his relentless pursuit of justice, he was called “the conscience of the Congress” by his colleagues.