Remembering an icon
Legislator who fought for racial justice dies at 80
Rep. John R. Lewis, a civil rights icon whose fight for racial justice began in the Jim Crow South and ended in Congress, died Friday night. He was 80 and had been battling pancreatic cancer.
WASHINGTON – Rep. John R. Lewis, the civil rights icon whose fight for racial justice began in the Jim Crow south and ended in the halls of Congress, died Friday night.
The Georgia lawmaker had been suffering from Stage IV pancreatic cancer since December. He was 80.
The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Lewis served in Congress for more than three decades, pushing the causes he championed as an original Freedom Rider challenging segregation, discrimination and injustice in the Deep South — issues reverberating today in the Black Lives Matter movement.
Along with Martin Luther King Jr., he was an organizer of the March on Washington in 1963, a seminal moment in the civil rights movement that led to the passage of voting rights for Blacks two years later.
He became a community activist and member of the Atlanta City Council before winning a seat in Congress in 1986. He would go on to become a best-selling author and in 2011 was awarded the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president. Lewis was elected to his 17th term in November 2018.
“(A)ll these years later, he is known as the Conscience of the United States Congress, still speaking his mind on issues of justice and equality,” Obama said in 2011, as he was bestowing the medal. “And generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.”
Obama said Saturday he hugged Lewis at his inauguration in 2009 and “told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made.”
Lewis “loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” Obama wrote.
Apart from the Freedom Riders, a group of black and white civil rights activists who rode interstate buses to fight segregation across the South, Lewis was one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which advocated for civil rights with demonstrations at lunch counters and voter-registration drives.
After four African American college students sat down on Feb. 1, 1960, at a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lewis helped organize similar sit-ins around the South that drew national attention to the rampant racism that pervaded southern states.
Lewis was arrested for the first time at a sit-in in Nashville on February 27, 1960. “If it hadn’t been for Nashville, I would not be the person I am now,” Lewis told the Nashville Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network, in 2013. “We grew up sitting down or sitting in. And we grew up very fast.”
“Some people were heard to say by sitting down these young people are standing up for the very best in American tradition,” Lewis told USA TODAY in 2013.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was so pleased. He was gratified, He was deeply moved and touched to see this new militancy on the part of the students,” the congressman continued. “He knew then that his message of non-violence and passive resistance would live, and it would be moving around the South, embedded in the very being of these young people.”
Arrested, jailed and beaten for challenging Jim Crow laws, Lewis would become a national figure by his early 20s. He later became the youngest of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders and, at 23, helped organize the March on Washington. There, he provided a keynote speech at the landmark event for civil rights.
Two years later, he helped organize the voting-rights march in Alabama that became known as “Bloody Sunday,” when state troopers attacked demonstrators with tear gas and billie clubs, a nationally televised melee hastened passage of the Voting Rights Act. Lewis’ skull was fractured in the demonstration.
Lewis remained the last surviving member of the Big Six, which included King, James Farmer, A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young.
His death comes shortly after the release of a new documentary that’s giving a new generation of civil rights activists a timely glimpse into his historic contributions.
Director Dawn Porter’s timely documentary, “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” premiered in early July as worldwide protests against racism and police brutality sparked by the death of George Floyd have renewed global calls for social justice.
“My greatest fear is that one day we may wake up and our democracy is gone,” Lewis says in the film.
In Congress, the soft-spoken Lewis was known for his work on voting rights. He long fought for more access to the polls, particularly for voters of color. In December, he banged the gavel in the House signaling passage of a voting rights bill he had championed.
A close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Lewis served in leadership posts. But the Georgia Democrat’s real power came from his stature as a civil rights icon. Lewis was one of the first lawmakers new members wanted to meet and he remained a revered figure, both by Republicans and Democrats, until his death.
“How fitting it is that even in the last weeks of his battle with cancer, John summoned the strength to visit the peaceful protests where the newest generation of Americans had poured into the streets to take up the unfinished work of racial justice,” Pelosi said in a statement after Lewis’ death. “In the Congress, John Lewis was revered and beloved on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol.”
Lewis often feuded with President Donald Trump, clashing over civil rights and voting rights.
He embraced the Black Lives Movement, telling the Washington Post in an interview in June that he was “inspired” to see throngs of people marching in the United States and around the world.