CIVIL RIGHTS ICON JOHN LEWIS DIES
Pelosi: We are ‘heartbroken’
Georgia Congressman loses battle with pancreatic cancer.
ATLANTA — John Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, has died. He was 80.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Lewis’ passing late Friday night, calling him “one of the greatest heroes of American history.”
“All of us were humbled to call Congressman Lewis a colleague, and are heartbroken by his passing,” Pelosi said. “May his memory be an inspiration that moves us all to, in the face of injustice, make ‘good trouble, necessary trouble.’ ”
Lewis’s announcement in December 2019 that he had advanced pancreatic cancer — “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” he said — inspired tributes and an unstated accord that his likely passing would represent the end of an era.
Lewis was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was best known for leading some 600 protesters in the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
At age 25 — at the head of the march — Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. His skull was fractured, and nationally televised images of the brutality forced the country’s attention on racial oppression in the
South.
President Lyndon Johnson was soon pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. The bill became law later that year, removing barriers that had barred Blacks from voting.
“John is an American hero who … risked his life for our most fundamental rights; he bears scars that attest to his indefatigable spirit and persistence,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said after Lewis announced his cancer diagnosis.
Lewis joined King and four other civil rights leaders in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. He spoke to the crowd just before King delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech.
A 23-year-old firebrand, Lewis dropped a reference to a “scorched earth” march through the South and scaled back criticisms of President John Kennedy. It was a potent speech nonetheless, in which he vowed: “By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy.”
It was almost immediately, and forever, overshadowed by the words of King, the man who had inspired him to activism.
Lewis was born Feb. 21, 1940, in Pike County, Alabama. He grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools.
Denied a library card because of the color of his skin, he became an avid reader, and could cite obscure historical dates and details even in his later years. He was a teenager when he first heard King preaching on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking to become the first Black student at Alabama’s segregated Troy State University.
He began organizing sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests while traveling around the South to challenge segregation.
Lewis helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was named its chairman in 1963, making him one of the Big Six. All six met at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York to plan and announce the March on Washington.
The huge demonstration galvanized the movement, but success didn’t come quickly. Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams led demonstrators on a planned march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital, on March 7, 1965. Police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge.
Authorities fired tear gas and charged on horseback, sending many to the hospital and horrifying much of the nation. King returned with thousands, completing the march to Montgomery before the end of the month.
Lewis turned to politics in 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council. After Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Lewis became his party’s senior deputy whip, helping to keep the party unified.
Obama honored Lewis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and they marched hand in hand in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack.
Lewis refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, saying he didn’t consider him a “legitimate president” because Russians had conspired to get him elected. In a speech the day of the House impeachment vote of Trump, Lewis explained the importance of that vote: “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. …” While the vote would be hard for some, he said, “We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”