Representative John Lewis, an icon of the civil rights movement and one of the original Freedom Riders, who went on to serve more than three decades in Congress, has died at 80. In December, Lewis announced he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” the Georgia Democrat said. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
The activist preached nonviolent resistance and equal rights from the front-lines of the civil rights movement, surviving brutal beating and arrests throughout the 1960s confrontations—most notably in Selma, where he led 600 or so protesters in the march that became known as Bloody Sunday. He continued to champion these principles even as his skull was fractured by the police, footage of which was televised nationally and helped galvanize the country’s support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Before his death on Friday, Lewis was the last survivor of the Big Six, the activist group led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that had the biggest impact on the civil rights movement. Lewis was also the last and youngest living speaker at Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech on the Mall, where Lewis, then just 23 years old, addressed the hundreds of thousands gathered at the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As the Washington Post notes, it was King’s broadcasts that first drew Lewis, the son of impoverished sharecroppers, to activism as a high school student in rural 1955 Alabama.
“Every minister I’d ever heard talked about ‘over yonder,’ where we’d put on white robes and golden slippers and sit with the angels,” Lewis wrote in Walking with the Wind, his 1998 memoir. “But this man was talking about dealing with the problems people were facing in their lives right now, specifically black lives in the South.”
Lewis went on to become one of the original 13 Freedom Riders, a group of Black and white activists who rode buses through the 1961 South, defying Jim Crow laws and challenging segregated interstate travel. He spoke often about the 40 times he was arrested or jailed for being involved in demonstrations throughout the 1960s. His fight for racial justice endured throughout his time as a Congressman, during which he was arrested five more times—most recently while protesting for immigration reform in 2013.
His political career earned him the reputation as “the conscience of Congress,” a lawmaker the Post described less as “a policy maven” than “as keeper of the 1960s flame.” In 1990, he championed support for a bill vetoed by President George H.W. Bush, legislation making it easier to bring employment discrimination suits that became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1991. When his colleague Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, proposed an amendment that would cut all funding of a part of the Voting Rights Act, Lewis took to the House floor, calling the proposed move “shameful.” The amendment died. Among his victories was the opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, winning authorization for its construction on the Mall in 2003. The Post notes that while Lewis was “revered on Capitol Hill,” he was also one of the most liberal members of Congress, “spending much of his career in the minority” and often losing policy battles as a result.
“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” former President Barack Obama, who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, said in a statement on Saturday. “And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.”