John Robert Lewis

Politician and civil rights activist

• Born: February 21, 1940
• Birthplace: Troy, Alabama
• Died: July 17, 2020
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

As a member and then president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis helped organize and lead some of the most memorable protests of the Civil Rights movement. After his first election in 1986, he served for more than three decades in the U.S. House of Representatives as a voice for civil rights and equality of opportunity.

Areas of achievement: Civil rights; Government and politics; Religion and theology

Early Life

John Robert Lewis was born into the rural, segregated South. He was one of ten children of Eddie and Willie Mae Carter Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers, poor farmers who rented a small piece of land for a share of the crop. The Lewises raised cotton, corn, and peanuts and raised chickens and hogs. Life was difficult, and some years the family barely scraped by. Along with his parents and grandparents, Lewis and his siblings had to help around the farm, even if that meant missing school.

Lewis was inspired at an early age to become a minister. As young as age seven, he preached to the family’s chickens. He also was interested in history, listening intently to the stories of elders and asking why things happened as they had. One fact he kept questioning was segregation.

In 1955, African Americans in nearby Montgomery, Alabama, began their year-long boycott of the city’s segregated buses. Lewis followed the story in the newspaper and was riveted by radio broadcasts of speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. This experience cemented Lewis’s desires to fight segregation and to become a minister. To fulfill the latter dream, Lewis applied to Troy State College; however, the all-white school never responded to his application. He also applied to Nashville’s American Baptist College, which he chose because it allowed students to work in order to pay tuition. Lewis started school in September of 1957.

Life’s Work

While at American Baptist, Lewis met James Lawson, a fellow seminary student who was conducting workshops on nonviolent protest. Lewis embraced the idea of nonviolence. In the fall of 1959, the Nashville students conducted their first protest, a sit-in. The next year, many of these Nashville students, including Lewis, helped form a new civil rights group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In 1961, as he finished at American Baptist, Lewis took part in the Freedom Rides as one of the original thirteen Freedom Riders. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), led by James Farmer, Jr., wanted to challenge southern laws that segregated interstate bus travel and bus stations—both of which the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional. Lewis joined the riders, who left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961.

Five days later, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, an angry mob assaulted Lewis and another Freedom Rider. After the attack, Lewis returned to Nashville. The rides were called off after more violence in Alabama. However, Lewis, Diane Nash, and other Nashville students were determined to press the protest. They launched a second wave of rides. When they reached Montgomery, Alabama, they were arrested. After being transported back to the Tennessee border, they returned to complete their ride. On this trip, they got as far as Birmingham, where they were met by an angry crowd. Several Riders, including Lewis, were severely beaten.

The Freedom Rides continued all summer, although Lewis’s part was ended. That fall, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) declared that segregated interstate buses and terminals were illegal and that the law would be enforced. The Freedom Riders had won a victory.

Lewis spent the next two years studying religion and philosophy atFisk University in Nashville and continuing to work with the SNCC. In 1963, he was elected chairman of the group, which had become one of the leading civil rights organizations. Lewis’s stature in the movement was confirmed that summer, when he and the SNCC helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which featured Dr. King as the main speaker. At age twenty-three, Lewis was the youngest speaker at the march’s main event, the rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

In 1964, the SNCC shifted its focus to voting rights. Many SNCC activists traveled to Mississippi to take part in what they called the Freedom Summer campaign. The voting rights drive still lacked support from the federal government, though. The following spring, Lewis and civil rights activist Hosea Williams organized one of the most famous marches in US history. Lewis and about 600 other protesters marched from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, to revive the push for voting rights. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, the marchers were met partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge by Alabama state police in riot gear who attacked them with tear gas, bullwhips, rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire, dogs, and nightsticks. The attack became known as Bloody Sunday. Lewis, at the forefront, sustained a fractured skull after a state trooper hit him with a billy club, knocked him to the ground, and hit him again when he tried to get back up.

The march resumed later in the month under the leadership of Dr. King. The march, and the violence visited upon it, spurred sympathy for the Civil Rights movement. It also prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce to Congress the Voting Rights Act, which passed Congress and was signed into law on August 6. The law guaranteed voting rights to Black Americans by striking down literacy tests they were required to take before registering to vote and replaced segregationist voting registrars with federal registrars. By this time, some members of SNCC had grown disillusioned with the nonviolent approach—a position Lewis never abandoned. In 1966, he was replaced as head of the organization by Stokely Carmichael, who took the group in a more militant direction.

Lewis remained active in civil rights over the next several years. In 1977, he was named by President Jimmy Carter to head ACTION, a federal agency that coordinated volunteer work. In 1981, Lewis won a seat on the Atlanta City Council. Five years later, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He represented Georgia's Fifth Congressional District from 1987 until his death in 2020.

In Congress, Lewis focused on such causes as civil rights, women’s rights, and peace. Though his constituents were in Atlanta, he championed causes that affected Americans across the country. He was a member of the US House Committee on Ways and Means from 2012 until his death, and served as chair (2011–12), or ranking member (2013–14; 2015–16) of its subcommittee on oversight. His other Ways and Means subcommittee assignments included income security and family support; human resources; and health. He also sat on the Joint Committee on Taxation from 2019 to 2020. In December 2019, Lewis voted with most of his Democratic colleagues in the House to impeach President Donald Trump on two charges of high crimes and misdemeanors.

Lewis received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, the Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize. In 2011, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.

On December 29, 2019, Lewis announced that he had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and pledged to fight it with the same intensity with which he fought racial injustice. Still in office, he died on July 17, 2020, at the age of eighty. Lewis was married to Lillian Mills from 1968 until her death in 2012. His survivors include their son, John-Miles Lewis.

Significance

One of the key figures of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Lewis was a leader in at least four of the movement’s most notable campaigns: the Freedom Rides the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, and the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. Arrested dozens of times and beaten many times, he never wavered from his belief in and practice of nonviolence. While unwilling to embrace stronger tactics, Lewis never lost his commitment to the cause of equal rights and an end to segregation. By putting his body, and even his life, on the line, he demonstrated the depth of that commitment. With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights act, millions of Black Americans registered to vote and shifted the political landscape of the South. They were instrumental in electing Georgia's Jimmy Carter to the presidency and in creating opportunities for Black politicians, like Lewis himself and eventually Barack Obama, to run for public office. As a member of the House of Representatives, Lewis never stopped speaking on behalf of the causes he held important. Such was his passion for justice that his fellow representatives hailed him as the "conscience of the Congress." His leadership as an activist and politician inspired countless others to, as he put it, "get into trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble" in pursuit of building what Lewis, Dr. King, and other civil rights activists called the "Beloved Community," described by Lewis in a New York Times op-ed essay that he wrote shortly before he died as "a nation and world society at peace with itself" (30 July 2020).

Bibliography

Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Arsenault’s examination of the Freedom Rides details both the historic early rides and the subsequent waves of Riders who continued the effort during the summer of 1961.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Branch’s history of an important decade in the Civil Rights movement includes a vivid portrait of the young Lewis.

Lewis, John. "Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation." The New York Times, 30 July 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020.

Lewis, John, and Michael D’Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Lewis describes his childhood, involvement in the Civil Rights movement, and subsequent career.

Seelye, Katharine Q. "John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80." The New York Times, 17 July 2020, updated 4 Aug. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/john-lewis-dead.html. Accessed 5 Aug. 2020.

Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2002. Zinn’s book, originally published in the 1960’s, focuses on the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, before Lewis’s ouster as president.