Politician and civil rights activist
BORN FEBRUARY 21, 1940 – DIED JULY 17, 2020, AGED 80
ALTHOUGH civil rights activist John Lewis wanted to lead a peaceful 600-strong protest across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965, soon after setting out he lay beaten and bleeding on the ground in fear of his life.
The brutal violence inflicted by Alabama police on black Americans as they marched for equal voting rights that afternoon would go down in history as Bloody Sunday.
Millions watched their TVs horrified as state troopers clubbed the crowds with batons and deployed tear gas – it was a turning point in the civil rights movement.
Lewis was the youngest of the “Big Six” leaders alongside Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.
Born in the city of Troy, Alabama, the third of 10 children to sharecroppers Eddie Lewis and Willie Mae (née Carter), he grew up in a racist world defined by the
Jim Crow laws. When he heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio and learned about Rosa Park’s bus boycott, he felt compelled to become an activist.
In 1961, he became one of the original 13 Freedom Fighters – seven black, six white – intent on journeying together by bus from Washington to New Orleans.
As in 1965, he was brutally assaulted and hauled into jail. In total, he was arrested 45 times at various civil rights events.
Lewis won an Atlanta City Council seat in 1981, serving for five years.
He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1986 as a Democrat for Georgia’s 5th District and re-elected 16 times.
Lewis died of pancreatic cancer. He was predeceased by his wife Lillian in 2012 and is survived by his son, John-Miles Lewis.