Civil rights leader Lewis is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
US congressman John Lewis has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer.
The 79-year-old Democrat is the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group once led by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.
As a civil rights activist at 25, Mr Lewis was beaten so badly his skull was fractured.
The TV images of that incident from an Alabama bridge in the 1960s helped awaken America to the realities of racial discrimination.
The veteran congressman from Georgia has fought many struggles, yet he said: “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
The stage four cancer was detected earlier this month.
Mr Lewis was arrested at least 40 times during the civil rights era, and several more times as a congressman since being elected in 1986. Just recently he had rallied to help reunite immigrant families separated by the Trump administration.
He has made clear that he has no plans to step aside from power while he undergoes treatment.
Mr Lewis said being elected to Congress “has been the honour of a lifetime” and that he will continue working for his constituents.
He said: “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have a fighting chance.”
Mr Lewis declined to say where he would receive cancer treatment or what that would entail. But he said he may not always be around the halls of Congress in the coming weeks.
“I may miss a few votes during this period, but with God’s grace I will be back on the frontlines soon,” he said, in asking for prayers.
Mr Lewis also said he was “cleareyed about the prognosis” even as doctors have told him that recent medical advances have made this type of cancer treatable.
He added that “treatment options are no longer as debilitating as they once were”.
Sometimes called the “conscience of the Congress”, Mr Lewis led hundreds of protesters in the 1965 Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
He was at the head of the march when he was knocked to the ground and beaten by police.
In 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, who had marched with Lewis hand in hand in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack.