Last of Big Six dies
Civil rights icon, longtime congressman John Lewis was 80
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, died Friday. He was 80.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Lewis’ death 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’ announcement in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer — “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” he said — inspired tributes from both sides of the aisle and an unstated accord that the likely death of this Atlanta Democrat would represent the end of an era.
Lewis was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that had
the greatest impact on the movement. He was bestknown for leading some
600 protesters in the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
At age 25, walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat, 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.
Within days, King led more marches in the state, and President Lyndon Johnson soon was 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 helped lead a movement and 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.
Audience in Nevada
Lewis told the Review-journal in an April 2018 interview that a failing education system is the greatest social justice issue facing America today.
“As a nation and as a people, we are not doing enough,” he said during the interview. “Many of our children are not receiving the very best possible education that they could receive.”
He delivered the keynote address at a gala to support Touro University Nevada, a private institution in Henderson that offers degrees in health care and education and has about 1,400 students.
“I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die,” Lewis told the crowd of more than 500. “Fifty-three years later, I don’t know how I made it across that bridge.”
Lewis described growing up in the segregated South and being denied a library card because he was Black. In 1998, he returned to the same library where he’d been denied years earlier — to sign copies of his memoir.
Lewis also touched on gun control in his Nevada speech, saying too many people are dying in churches, in schools and at concerts.
“We have to do something. We cannot be quiet,” he said. “We have to speak up and use our votes as a powerful nonviolent tool.”
Lewis said he doesn’t consider himself a hero.
“I consider myself an individual who was deeply inspired by the teaching and the work of Martin Luther King Jr. to do what I could to help out,” he said. “I don’t consider myself an icon, just a poor child growing up in rural Alabama who happened to be more than lucky, but blessed.”
Stirring speaker
Lewis joined King and four other civil rights leaders in organizing the 1963 March on Washington. He spoke to the vast crowd just before King delivered his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech.
A 23-year-old firebrand, Lewis toned down his intended remarks at the insistence of others, dropping a reference to a “scorched earth” march through the South and scaling 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 on
Feb. 21, 1940, outside the town of Troy, in Pike County, Alabama. He grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools.
As a boy, he wanted to be a minister and practiced his oratory on the family chickens. 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 support to become the first Black student at Alabama’s segregated Troy State University.
He ultimately attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. 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 at a tender age. The others, in addition to King, were Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Negro American Labor Council; James L. Farmer
Jr. of the Congress of Racial Equality; and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP. 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. After extensive training in nonviolent protest, 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. A phalanx of police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge.
Authorities shoved, then swung their truncheons, 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.
Time in public office
Lewis turned to politics in 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council.
He won his seat in Congress in 1986 and spent much of his career in the minority. After Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Lewis became his party’s senior deputy whip, a behind-the-scenes leadership post in which he helped keep the party unified.
In an early setback for Barack Obama’s 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Lewis endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton for the nomination. Lewis switched when it became clear that Obama had overwhelming Black support. Obama later 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 also worked for 15 years to gain approval for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Humble and unfailingly friendly, Lewis was revered on Capitol Hill. But as one of the most liberal members of Congress, he often lost policy battles, from his effort to stop the Iraq War to his defense of young immigrants.
He met bipartisan success in Congress in 2006 when he led efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court later invalidated much of the law, and it became once again what it was in his youth: a work in progress. Later, when the presidency of Donald Trump challenged his civil rights legacy, Lewis made no effort to hide his pain.
Lewis refused to attend Trump’s inauguration, saying he didn’t consider him a “legitimate president” because he believed that Russia had conspired to get him elected.