USA: Rep. John Lewis, the legendary civil rights leader who helped organize the March on Washington and was later known as the “conscience of Congress,” died Friday at age 80.
The Georgia Democrat announced in December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
“I have been in some kind of fight ― for freedom, equality, basic human rights ― for nearly my entire life,” Lewis said in a statement at the time. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
Lewis has been on the front lines of the fight for democracy for most of his life. Born on Feb. 21, 1940, to sharecroppers outside of Troy, Alabama, Lewis grew up attending segregated public schools. After watching the activism that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and hearing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words on the radio, Lewis was inspired to join the civil rights movement and fought for voting rights ever since.
As a college student attending Fisk University, Lewis helped organize peaceful sit-in protests at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. At age 21, he volunteered to be a Freedom Rider — one of the activists who risked their lives challenging segregation throughout the South by sitting in seats reserved for white people. (The protest was inspired by Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat for a white man in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.)
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Lewis helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became its chairman during the peak of the civil rights movement from 1963 to 1966. Lewis organized student activism in the movement through SNCC and was eventually considered one of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement, alongside King.
At 23, Lewis was one of the organizers of and the youngest keynote speaker at the March on Washington in August 1963. He helped launch voter registration drives during the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, yet another example of his determination to bring voting rights to Black people.
Lewis often faced violent consequences for his civil rights leadership. He was repeatedly arrested and beaten by police and angry mobs for challenging Jim Crow segregation in the South and fighting for voting rights.
Lewis held hope for the future of America even through the pandemic and widespread anger over civil rights. As protests erupted nationwide over the police slaying of a Black Minnesota man, George Floyd, Lewis remarked on the sheer scope of the movement.
“I’ve come in contact with people who feel inspired. They’re moved. They’ve just never been along in a protest — they’ve never been in a march before — they decided to march with their children and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and to walk with them,” he said in June.
“They’re helping to educate and inspire another generation of activists. It’s seeing an effect. There can be no turning back; there can be no giving up.”
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