lit a candle 11h agoBloody Sunday changed everything. His courage that day still matters.
Their story
John Robert Lewis (21 February 1940 - 17 July 2020) was an American civil rights leader and Democratic congressman whose life ran from a sharecropping childhood in Pike County, Alabama, through the front lines of the nonviolent movement of the 1960s, to more than three decades as the moral voice…
John Robert Lewis (21 February 1940 - 17 July 2020) was an American civil rights leader and Democratic congressman whose life ran from a sharecropping childhood in Pike County, Alabama, through the front lines of the nonviolent movement of the 1960s, to more than three decades as the moral voice of the U.S. House. He died in Atlanta at 80 after an eight-month public battle with stage IV pancreatic cancer, on the same day and in the same city as fellow movement elder C. T. Vivian. He was the last surviving member of the civil rights "Big Six."
Born near Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (nee Carter) and Eddie Lewis, he grew up poor among Black sharecropping families. His great-grandfather Frank Carter had been born enslaved in the same county. As a small boy Lewis preached to the family's chickens and dreamed of the ministry. A Rosenwald school and a teacher who told him to "read, my child, read" shaped him; at 16 he and relatives were turned away from the Troy public library because it was "for whites only." Hearing Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio during the Montgomery bus boycott, and later meeting King, redirected his vocation from preaching alone to organized nonviolent action.
At American Baptist College and Fisk University in Nashville he trained in James Lawson's workshops on Gandhian nonviolence and helped lead the Nashville sit-ins that desegregated downtown lunch counters. In 1961 he became one of the original Freedom Riders challenging segregated interstate travel. Beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and later imprisoned about 37 to 40 days in Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary after an arrest in Jackson for using a "white" restroom, he refused to quit the rides. By his early twenties he had already been arrested dozens of times.
In 1963, still in his early twenties, Lewis was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and became the youngest of the Big Six organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On 28 August 1963 he delivered a forceful speech from the Lincoln Memorial, moderated under pressure from older leaders yet still among the day's sharpest criticisms of federal passivity toward police violence. On 7 March 1965 he helped lead some 600 marchers across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama troopers fractured his skull in the attack remembered as Bloody Sunday; televised images helped build support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
After leaving SNCC's chair in 1966 as the organization shifted toward Black Power, Lewis worked with the Field Foundation, the Southern Regional Council, and the Voter Education Project, helping register hundreds of thousands of Black voters. President Jimmy Carter named him associate director of ACTION in 1977. He won an Atlanta City Council seat in 1981, then in 1986 defeated Julian Bond in a hard-fought Democratic runoff for Georgia's Fifth Congressional District. He took office in January 1987 and held the seat for 17 terms until his death, becoming dean of the Georgia delegation, a long-serving chief deputy whip, and widely nicknamed the "conscience of the Congress."
In the House he championed voting rights, civil rights, health care, and gun-safety measures, including a 2016 Democratic sit-in over firearms legislation. He endorsed Barack Obama early, stood with Obama at commemorations of the movement, and in 2011 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. With Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell he published the graphic memoir trilogy March, which brought his story to a new generation; March: Book Three won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2016. He often told audiences to get into "good trouble, necessary trouble."
Lewis married Lillian Miles in 1968 after meeting her at a New Year's Eve party hosted by Xernona Clayton; she died on 31 December 2012, their wedding anniversary. Their son, John-Miles Lewis, survives him. In December 2019 Lewis announced his cancer diagnosis and vowed to fight it as he had fought for human rights. On 7 June 2020, after chemotherapy, he made a final public appearance at the Black Lives Matter mural on Sixteenth Street in Washington. After death he lay in state at the U.S. Capitol (the first African American lawmaker so honored in the Rotunda), was carried back over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and was eulogized at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church by Barack Obama, with Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also speaking. He was buried at South-View Cemetery. On the day of his funeral The New York Times published his farewell essay calling a new generation to redeem the soul of the nation.
This memorial is for John Robert Lewis (1940-2020), U.S. civil rights leader and Georgia congressman. It is not for the UK retailer John Lewis and Partners, and not for other people named John Lewis.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia John Lewis; NYT/AP/WABE obituaries (Jul 2020); House biography; March trilogy; John and Lillian Miles Lewis Foundation; TED/Stevenson 2019; Commons PD portrait.
In their own words
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Lifelong credo; repeated in speeches and interviews.
“I have been in some kind of fight - for freedom, equality, basic human rights - for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
Cancer announcement, December 2019.
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.”
Public message / tweet, 2018.
“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.”
TED conversation with Bryan Stevenson, 2019.
“We must say: Wake up America! Wake up! For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”
March on Washington speech, 28 August 1963, concluding charge.
“Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. The way of love is better.”
Public remarks; widely clipped (e.g. Clinton Global Initiative video).
Photos
1Official 2006 House portrait of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA).
by People Forever
They already have. My daughter learned them in class before she even knew his name.