John Lewis

John Robert Lewis was born in Pike County, Alabama, on the twenty-first of February 1940, the son of sharecroppers. He took his theological education at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where he met Diane Nash and James Bevel and joined the Nashville Student Movement.

He was twenty-one years old when, on the fourteenth of May 1961, his Freedom Riders bus was firebombed by a Klan mob outside Anniston, Alabama. He was beaten unconscious. He continued.

He chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966. He delivered the keynote at the 1963 March on Washington as its youngest speaker, at twenty-three — his speech, the most pointed of the day, was edited at the request of the older civil-rights leaders.

On the seventh of March 1965 — Bloody Sunday — he led six hundred marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Alabama State Troopers met the column with clubs and tear gas. Lewis's skull was fractured. The televised footage of the assault accelerated the Voting Rights Act through Congress within five months.

He served seventeen terms in the United States House of Representatives from Georgia's 5th congressional district, from 1987 until his death. He was, by the affectionate consensus of his colleagues on both sides of the aisle, the conscience of the American Congress.

He died of pancreatic cancer in Atlanta on the seventeenth of July 2020, age eighty. He had carried the scars of the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the end. The bridge — named for a Confederate general and Klansman — was the subject of an active renaming campaign in his honor at the time of his death.

He is honored here as the marcher who walked Bloody Sunday and the congressman who carried its memory for fifty-five years.