Remembering John Lewis, civil rights icon and ‘American hero’
WASHINGTON — People paid great heed to John Lewis for much of his life in the civil rights movement. But at the very beginning — when he was just a kid wanting to be a minister someday — his audience didn’t care much for what he had to say.
A son of Alabama sharecroppers, the young Mr. Lewis first preached moral righteousness to his family’s chickens.
His place in the vanguard of the 1960s campaign for Black equality had its roots in that hardscrabble Alabama farm.
Mr. Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists who organized the 1963 March on Washington.
He spoke shortly before the group’s leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to a vast sea of people.
If that speech marked a turning point in the civil rights era — or at least the most famous moment — the struggle was far from over. Two more hard years passed before truncheon-wielding state troopers beat Mr. Lewis bloody and fractured his skull as he led 600 protesters over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Searing TV images of that brutality helped to galvanize national opposition to racial oppression and embolden leaders in Washington to pass the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act five months later.
That bridge became a touchstone in Mr. Lewis’ life. He returned there often during his decades in Congress representing the Atlanta area, bringing lawmakers from both parties to see where “Bloody Sunday” went down.
Mr. Lewis earned bipartisan respect in Washington, where some called him the “conscience of Congress.” His humble manner contrasted with the puffed chests on Capitol Hill. But as a liberal on the losing side of many issues, he lacked the influence he’d summoned at the segregated lunch counters of his youth, or later, within the Democratic Party, as a steadfast voice for the poor and disenfranchised.
He was a guiding voice for a young Illinois senator who became the first Black president.
“I told him that I stood on his shoulders,” Barack Obama wrote in a statement marking Mr. Lewis’ death. “When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made.”
Mr. Lewis was a 23-yearold firebrand, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, when he joined Rev. King and four other civil rights leaders at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York to plan and announce the Washington demonstration.
The others were Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Negro American Labor Council; James L. Farmer Jr. of the interracial Congress of Racial Equality; and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.
After months of training in nonviolent protest, demonstrators led by Mr. Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams began a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Alabama’s capital in Montgomery.
They didn’t get far: On March 7, 1965, a phalanx of police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge.
Authorities swung truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. The nation was horrified.
“People just couldn’t believe this was happening, not in America,” Mr. Lewis wrote in his memoirs.
King swiftly returned to the scene with a multitude, and the march to Montgomery was made whole before the end of the month.
In 1981, Mr. Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council, and then won a seat in Congress in 1986.