John Lewis II

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Religious faith was a lifelong constant for Rep. John Lewis
By JAY REEVES, Associated Press (07/18/20)

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — From his childhood, when he preached to chickens in the dirt-poor South, to his decades as a moral force in Congress, religious faith was a constant in the life of Rep. John Lewis.

In this Friday, March 5, 1999, file photo, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., speaks with reporters in Washington. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020

Lewis spent boyhood days as a make-believe minister, preaching to a congregation of clucking birds at his rural home in Alabama. As a teen, inspired by the oratory and leadership of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he went on to become a civil rights activist in his own right while attending a Baptist college in Tennessee. Like the earliest evangelists of Christianity, he was beaten and jailed for speaking out when others were silent.

In later years, as an elder member of the U.S. House, Lewis advocated for both justice and reconciliation. Returning to a tactic he first learned nearly 60 years earlier, Lewis led a sit-in on the House floor in 2016 to protest the failure of gun-control measures.

Lewis died Friday at age 80.

Despite memories that sometimes brought him to tears, and defying the diminishing strength that came with advancing age, Lewis for years led annual pilgrimages to the Deep South for fellow members of Congress seeking to both honor the legacy of the civil rights movement and push it in new directions.

In this Sunday March 4, 2007, file photo, from left, Brown Chapel AME Church Pastor James Jackson, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Georgia, and Rev. Clete Kiley, hold hands and sing at the end of a church service in Selma, Ala., on the commemoration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020.

“He is the reason I come,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a longtime participant in the pilgrimages, said of Lewis during the 2019 tour, sponsored by the Faith and Politics Institute in Washington.

Born in 1940, Lewis grew up near Troy, Alabama, at a time when racial segregation was the law and ministers were typically leading members of the Black community. Since his sharecropper family lived in a state run by and for white people, Lewis had virtually no Black political leaders to emulate as a role model.

So, as Lewis often recounted, he would gather together a congregation composed of siblings, cousins and fowl in the yard and emulate the preachers he heard on Sunday at church with his family.

“And I would start speaking or preaching. And when I look back, some of these chickens would bow their heads. Some of these chickens would shake their heads. They never quite said ‘Amen,’ but I’m convinced that some of those chickens that I preached to during the ‘40s and the ‘50s tended to listen to me much better than some of my colleagues listen to me today,” he said in an interview with C-SPAN in 2012.

Lewis was 15 when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, about 60 miles north of Lewis’ hometown. He had already witnessed the harsh reality of “white only” signs on public restrooms and water fountains. He was drawn to scratchy radio broadcasts by King, then a young minister in his first pastorate in Montgomery, and later the leader of the yearlong bus boycott that followed Parks’ arrest.

In this Feb. 23, 1965, file photo, Wilson Baker, left foreground, public safety director, warns of the dangers of night demonstrations at the start of a march in Selma, Ala. Second from right foreground, is John Lewis of the Student Non-Violent Committee. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020. 

“He was not concerned about the streets of heaven and the pearly gates and the streets paved with milk and honey,” Lewis said of King in an interview for the documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” released in 1987. “He was more concerned about the streets of Montgomery and the way that Black people and poor people were being treated in Montgomery.”

After meeting King during a trip to Montgomery, Lewis enrolled at American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee, where he considered becoming a minister. He learned the concepts of nonviolent protest through ministers and the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, an arm of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, plus the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.

Activism fueled by religion guided Lewis’ life. In later years he worried aloud that some people failed to understand civil rights activism as an extension of faith for many participants in the movement, rooted in stories about Jesus and the words of Gandhi, who was born Hindu and embraced many teachings.

“In my estimation, the civil rights movement was a religious phenomenon. When we’d go out to sit in or go out to march, I felt, and I really believe, there was a force in front of us and a force behind us, ’cause sometimes you didn’t know what to do. You didn’t know what to say, you didn’t know how you were going to make it through the day or through the night. But somehow and some way, you believed — you had faith — that it all was going to be all right,” Lewis told PBS in 2004.

 In this Friday, Dec. 6, 2019, file photo, civil rights leader U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., is extolled at an event with fellow Democrats before passing the Voting Rights Advancement Act to eliminate potential state and local voter suppression laws, at the Capitol in Washington. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020.

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Why John Lewis Kept Telling the Story of Civil Rights, Even Though It Hurt
Lily Rothman, Time (07/18/20)

John Lewis served in Congress since 1986, representing Georgia in the House of Representatives. But his constituents were far from all the longtime legislator, who died on Friday at age 80, represented.

Lewis was a witness to, participant in and survivor of some of the most pivotal moments of the American civil rights movement: he gave a speech at the 1963 March on Washington; he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965; he took part in more recent acts of resistance. In a movement in which so many great lights were extinguished early, his longevity left him to serve as a de facto spokesman for what he saw.

But it’s not by chance that Lewis’ name is tied so closely to the nation’s still-visceral memories of those moments. Throughout his life, the Congressman spoke often about his purposeful quest to tell and retell the story of what he had been through, so that nobody could forget. He turned his experiences into bestselling books and share-worthy speeches and even a catchphrase — and he did so with intention.

In 2017, Lewis spoke to TIME for the magazine’s 10 Questions feature. In this previously unpublished excerpt from the conversation, Lewis explained why he kept telling his story, even though it wasn’t easy for him:

Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) is photographed in his offices in the Canon House office building in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2009.

You’ve talked about the importance of telling the story [of the Civil Rights Movement] over and over again, and how it affects the people who hear it. But how does telling that story again and again affect you?

Yes, when I tell the story, and I tell it over and over again, even for hundreds and thousands of students, to little children and adults who come to the office or when I’m out on the road speaking, it affects me — and sometimes it brings me to tears. But I think it’s important to tell it. Maybe it will help educate or inspire other people so they too can do something, they too can make a contribution.

I went up to Rochester, N.Y., back in October, with a colleague of mine, Louise Slaughter, who represents Rochester. [Slaughter died in March of 2018.] And I went to a church that Frederick Douglass had attended, an African American Methodist church, and I went to a house called the Motherhouse. Two of the nuns that took care of us at the hospital in Selma when we were beaten on March 7, 1965, they retired there. These two nuns are feeble, up in age, but they recognized me and they called me John and I called them sisters. There were many other nuns sitting around and they started crying and I cried with them and hugged them, and they showed me this stained glass that was taken from the chapel of the hospital in Selma, which is now closed, and they’d brought it to Rochester. And we stood there and did a song and a hymn.

It’s uplifting and it’s powerful to me to tell the story and to respond to people asking questions. It makes us all stronger and more determined.

Civil Rights leaders, including future Congressman John Lewis (third left) and Gloria Richardson (third right), chair of the Cambridge Non-Violent Action Committee, link hands as they march in protest of a scheduled speech by the pro-segregationist Alabama governor, George Wallace in Cambridge, Md., in May 1964.

I’ve heard that one of the catalysts that inspired you to run for office was the run of terrible things that happened at the end of the 1960s, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. What’s the key to responding to terrible things by taking action rather than just collapsing?

You have to pull up on the best in the human spirit. You just say “I’m not going to be down.” You have what I call an executive session with yourself. You could say, “Listen self, listen John Lewis, you’re just not going to get lost in a sea of despair. You’re not going to be down. You’re going to get up.”

The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy was the saddest time in my life. I admired both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I admired those two men. Martin Luther King Jr. had taught me how to stand up, to speak up and speak out, and how to get involved. When I first met him, he called me the Boy from Troy, and up until the time of his death, he still referred to me as the Boy from Troy, because I grew up outside of Troy, Alabama. And I met Robert Kennedy for the first time in 1963, when I was 23 years old, before the March on Washington. And he was so inspiring, so uplifting. In my Washington office, I have a picture with him when he was Attorney General, from a campaign poster from 1968. These two young leaders, I thought, represented the very best of America. And when Dr. King was assassinated, I was with Bobby Kennedy when we heard. And as a matter of fact, it was Bobby Kennedy that announced at this campaign rally at Indianapolis, Indiana, to the crowd. As I was working on this campaign, trying to get people to come out to the rally, he said, we have some bad news tonight, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. I heard that he’d been shot but we didn’t know his condition.

And I really felt when the two of them died that something died in America. Something died in all of us. And sometimes we never recover from situations like these. I became convinced in myself that I had to do something, I had to pick up where Dr. King left off and Bobby Kennedy left off.

One of the civil rights-era experiences that Lewis often recounted, as he told what he had been through, was the experience of hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak on the radio when Lewis was a teenager. Lewis felt, he would say, that King was speaking directly to him, telling him to get involved — and that the “spirit of history” was moving through him, too. The spirit of history told him that the moment was right to stand up, and that the time had come to take his place in the story of the world.

Now, as America remembers a civil rights leader who protected and advanced that legacy in the decades after King’s assassination, it seems safe to say that the spirit was right.

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Colleagues and leaders remember John Lewis as a humble mentor, in addition to an icon
Katherine Tully-McManus and Lindsey McPherson, Roll Call (07/18/20)

Outpourings of grief, gratitude and remembrance followed the news of Rep. John Lewis’ death Friday night, from lawmakers and leaders on both sides of the aisle and a new generation that is holding tight to his mentorship. 

From left, Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Lucy McBath, D-Ga., John Lewis, D-Ga., Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Lisa Blunt Rochester, D-Del., walk through the Capitol Rotunda after watching a Senate a vote on a continuing resolution to re-open the government which failed, on Thursday, January 24, 2019.

Flags at the Capitol, the White House and government buildings across the country flew at half staff Saturday, at the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Donald Trump. 

It is not yet clear how large public tributes, such as a memorial service or a ceremony at the Capitol, will be handled while restrictions on large gatherings remain in place as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

Early Saturday morning, former President Barack Obama added his words to the chorus of praise for the Georgia Democrat, referencing a recent virtual meeting together with activists leading demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death. 

President Barack Obama greets Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., as he arrives in the House chamber for his first address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

“He could not have been prouder of their efforts — of a new generation standing up for freedom and equality, a new generation intent on voting and protecting the right to vote, a new generation running for political office,” Obama wrote in a post on Medium. “They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it.”

“Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did. And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders — to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise,” wrote Obama. 

Pelosi repeated what she had said about Lewis so many times before, that he was “the conscience of the Congress,” and honored “the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that “Congressman Lewis’ place among the giants of American history was secure before his career in Congress had even begun.” 

“You did not need to agree with John on many policy details to be awed by his life, admire his dedication to his neighbors in Georgia’s Fifth District, or appreciate his generous, respectful, and friendly bearing,” the Kentucky Republican wrote. Like Lewis, McConnell was born in Alabama.

 From left, Martin Luther King III, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.,join hands to sing “We Shall Overcome,” during a ceremony to honor the 40th anniversary of the assassination Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred on April 4, 1968

Former President Jimmy Carter remembered him as a fellow Georgian.

“He made an indelible mark on history through his quest to make our nation more just,” wrote Carter. “John never shied away from what he called ‘good trouble’ to lead our nation on the path toward human and civil rights. Everything he did, he did in a spirit of love. All Americans, regardless of race or religion, owe John Lewis a debt of gratitude.”

As the sun rose Saturday morning, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn recorded a video with his thoughts on losing his close friend overnight.

“I am doing this tape during sunrise, because I do believe that as the sun set on John Lewis’ life last night, the sun rises on a movement that will never die. Thank you, John, rest in peace my brother,” the South Carolina Democrat said.

He recalled meeting Lewis in 1960 and how their first weekend organizing together for civil rights was “transformative” for him.

“We never thought back then that we would be successful enough in the movement to both end up serving in Congress together. Yet, for almost 27 years we did, because he never lost faith,” said Clyburn.

Rep. John Lewis pictured in August 1991

Clyburn said that as he rose the ranks in the Democratic Caucus, he never asked Lewis to nominate him for leadership positions.

“I never wanted John Lewis to be put in a position of not being able to say he was for everybody. Because he was. He was that kind of person,” said Clyburn.

Conscience and mentor of the Congress

Inside Congress, lawmakers’ awe of Lewis extended well beyond his Civil Rights legacy. House Democrats leaned on him for inspiration, which he would regularly provide both in speeches to the full caucus and in one-on-one settings.

“He was more than a colleague to me, and so many others — he was a mentor and a moral guide,” California Rep. Linda T. Sánchez said in a statement.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., greets Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the Capitol’s House chamber before members were sworn in on the first day of the 116th Congress on Jan. 3, 2019

Another California Democrat, Rep. Ro Khanna, tweeted that Lewis “was a beacon of wisdom, hope, and justice for our entire caucus & nation.”

“There isn’t a member among us who wasn’t mentored by him,” he said.

Khanna’s remark is not an overstatement. Seemingly every House Democrat has a story about a time when Lewis helped or inspired them. Many have shared those stories in the hours since his death, and posted pictures of themselves posing with their beloved colleague and mentor.

“Still can’t believe that I got to work with my hero. Besides all of his courageous work for justice, what always struck me was just how kind he was to everyone he met,” Rep. Brendan Boyle tweeted.

The Pennsylvania Democrat’s tweet featured a photo of him and Lewis that he said was taken “at about midnight while we were engaging in a daylong sit-in on the House floor to protest for a vote on our gun violence bill in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting.”

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., along with other members, address demonstrators on the East Front of the Capitol after the House Democrats’ sit-in ended on the floor, June 23, 2016. The Democrats were are calling on Republicans to allow a vote on measure to address gun violence

Rep. Lauren Underwood tweeted that she first met Lewis in 2006 as an intern before becoming his colleague in 2019.

“I always felt an overwhelming sense that there was so much to learn from him, and never enough time,” the Illinois Democrat said.

Lewis viewed his colleagues as equals, and in interactions he wanted make clear he was accessible as a friend.

“Every time I would see him, I would say, ‘Hello Mr. John Lewis.’ He would respond, ‘please call me John.’ And I would say, ‘okay, Mr. John Lewis.’ We would both laugh,” Rep. Val Demings said in a statement.

“I was in awe in the ‘60s and am still in awe today of the man who was larger than life,” the Florida Democrat added. “Mr. John Lewis was strong as a lion, yet gentle as dove. … In the dark and difficult days, he reminded us to protect our inner light, maintain our hope and our spirit; that only despair can impede the cause of justice.”

Lewis also referred to his colleagues as family and made them feel part of his enormous world.

“For all that he had been through and done, he had a lightness of spirit that was warm and welcoming,” Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Joaquin Castro said in a tweet. “When I would see him he would often ask, ‘How’re you doing, young brother?’”

“John was the one person who — when he spoke on the House floor — everyone would be quiet and actually listen respectfully — without grievance or cynicism,” the Texas Democrat added. “For a moment all the layers of partisan rancor built up over the years would melt away. He moved people.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted that Lewis “called me ‘daughter’ and would tell me how incredible it was for me to be in Congress and visit Africa with him as his colleague.”

“He never lost his youthful joy and passion for democracy,” the Minnesota Democrat, who was born in Somalia, said. “It was so contagious and fueled all who knew and loved him.”

Many members also tweeted stories and photos of Lewis taking to their constituents who visited the Capitol, and in some cases Lewis made trips to colleagues’ districts to deliver one of his many inspirational speeches.

“Always an inspiration and a leader. Willing to share his time to encourage and teach the young,” Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen said, quote-tweeting a woman named Sherwanda Chism who had shared a picture of Cohen and Lewis from 10 years ago when she and her students visited Cohen.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., speaks to 7th graders from the Epstein School, located in Atlanta, about Congress and his role in the civil rights struggle as they sit on the House steps on Thursday, April 15, 2010

“We were preparing to take a group pic & Cohen beckoned for Rep. Lewis as he was walking by,” Chism said. “Lewis blessed us and spoke words of encouragement into our lives.”

Lewis’s presence in Congress was felt every day, and his absence will be too.

“Never angry or puffed up with self importance, he was a humble servant who loved humanity,” Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson tweeted. “And we loved him back.”

The post Colleagues and leaders remember John Lewis as a humble mentor, in addition to an icon appeared first on Roll Call.

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Barack Obama on John Lewis' death: 'We will miss him dearly'
By Veronica Stracqualursi, CNN (07/18/20)

Former President Barack Obama on Saturday paid tribute to Rep. John Lewis and his "enormous impact" on America's history, saying that his election as the first Black president was possible because of the sacrifices Lewis made.

US President Barack Obama walks alongside Amelia Boynton Robinson (R), one of the original marchers, the Reverend Al Sharpton (2nd R), First Lady Michelle Obama (L), and US Representative John Lewis (2nd-L), Democrat of Georgia, and also one of the original marchers, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015. The event commemorates Bloody Sunday, when civil rights marchers attempting to walk to the Alabama capital of Montgomery to end voting discrimination against African Americans, clashed with police on the bridge

"I first met John when I was in law school, and I told him then that he was one of my heroes. Years later, when I was elected a U.S. Senator, I told him that I stood on his shoulders," Obama wrote in a statement following Lewis' death. "When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made."

Obama said Lewis "never stopped providing wisdom and encouragement to me" and former first lady Michelle, and their family. "We will miss him dearly," he said.

Lewis, a Democrat who served as the US representative for Georgia's 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, died Friday at the age of 80 after a six-month battle with cancer.

He was a Freedom Rider in the early 1960s, a keynote speaker at the historic 1963 March on Washington, and helped lead a march in 1965 for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he and other marchers were brutally beaten by police.

Lewis had described attending Obama's 2009 inauguration as an "out-of-body" experience.

"When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought -- I never dreamed -- of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected president of the United States," he said at the time.

In 2011, Obama awarded Lewis the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise. 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," Obama wrote in his statement Saturday.

Obama said that in "so many ways, John's life was exceptional" and given his "enormous impact on the history of this country, what always struck those who met John was his gentleness and humility."

"He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, a longing to do what's right, a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. And it's because he saw the best in all of us that he will continue, even in his passing, to serve as a beacon in that long journey towards a more perfect union," he wrote.

The 44th President said "it's fitting" that the last time he and Lewis shared a public forum was a virtual town hall with activists helping lead protests in the wake of George Floyd's death.

The two men spoke privately after, Obama said, and Lewis told him "he could not have been prouder of their efforts -- of a new generation standing up for freedom and equality, a new generation intent on voting and protecting the right to vote, a new generation running for political office."

"Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did," Obama wrote. "And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders -- to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise."

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Editorial: The humbling example of John Lewis
The LA Times Editorial Board (07/18/20)

 Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), shown speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., in 2012, died Friday at the age of 80.

Few life stories are as humbling as that of John Lewis, a civil rights icon and longtime Democratic congressman from Georgia who died Friday at age 80. Hoping to provoke this country to renounce the oppressive discrimination against Black Americans, he walked into certain confrontations with racist cops, Ku Klux Klansmen, hate-spewing citizens and unjust institutions, unarmed and armored only with the nobility of his cause. And even after being beaten, jailed and threatened with worse, he did it again and again, determined to stay on the path of nonviolence and prove that hate could be overcome by love.

Who has that kind of courage? Who is so steadfastly principled?

Lewis was famed for many things he did in his younger days — he was one of the original Freedom Riders who put their lives on the line defending the integration of public buses; as the 23-year-old leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he gave a fiery call to action at the famed 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (a warm-up to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech); he was in the vanguard of a voting rights march out of Selma, Ala., in 1965 that was brutally attacked by police, who fractured Lewis' skull. But as remarkable as that record is, it shouldn't overshadow the role he played since his election to the House in 1986. He wasn't an active legislator so much as a constant reminder of the gap between this country's founding ideals and its reality. He was a partisan Democrat, yes, but more than that he was the conscience of the Congress, which is why he was admired by so many of its members on both sides of the aisle.

Losing Lewis' voice is particularly gutting now, as the country is confronting anew the poison that he spent his life trying to extract. George Floyd's death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer triggered a wave of protests about police brutality, but the demand for reckoning goes well beyond that. We are being called to confront the structural racism and institutional barriers that have kept a knee on the neck of generations of Black, Latino and other disempowered Americans.

This country has enormous income inequality as well as a yawning wealth gap between white and Black and Latino Americans. The problems are getting worse, not better, as a disproportionate share of the gains from the decade of pre-COVID-19 economic growth were captured by the folks at the top of the economic ladder. Meanwhile, efforts to narrow the racial gap directly through programs like affirmative action are resisted by conservatives in legislatures and the courts, who argue for a "color-blind" approach that would cement the disadvantages brought about by centuries of discrimination.

Lewis put it this way in an op-ed for the Washington Post in 2011, on the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington: "Yes, we have come a great distance — but we still have a great distance to go."

And sometimes it feels like we haven't come that far after all. The scenes of police officers and federal agents in riot gear gassing and beating people during the Floyd protests are chillingly reminiscent of the 1960s and early 1970s, as are the calls from the Oval Office for "law and order" and a militarized response to the demonstrations. Granted, the protesters have not always hewed to Lewis' path of nonviolence, but too many times the clashes have been instigated and escalated by officers happy to deny people their 1st Amendment rights.

Lewis' faith in nonviolent protest was coupled with a firm belief in the transformative power of democracy. That's why one of his signal legislative achievements came long before he was elected to the House. The march he helped lead over the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma — and more pointedly, the horrifying racist violence it unleashed and exposed to the nation — galvanized support for the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, overcoming entrenched opposition from powerful Southern Democrats.

But to this country's great shame, Lewis' voting rights legacy is under increasing attack. Republicans across the country have used the myth of rampant voter fraud to engage in cynical voter suppression, buoyed by a disastrous 2013 Supreme Court ruling that allowed communities with histories of discrimination to adopt new voting rules without getting the Justice Department's approval in advance.

The fight for justice and equality for all is never ending. Lewis liked to tell people, "Never give up, never give in, never give out." The best way to honor his memory is to heed those words, especially when it comes time to vote.

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Appreciation: For John Lewis, a lifetime of making 'good trouble' left scars and a legacy
Susan Page, USA TODAY (07/18/20)

John Lewis rubbed the scar on his forehead, a reminder of the fractured skull he suffered when Alabama state troopers assaulted civil rights marchers trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965.

"From time to time, looking in a mirror, I tend to notice it," he told USA TODAY in an interview that marked the 50th anniversary of the protest, and of the beating by a nightstick that left the scar. The march known as Bloody Sunday helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act and change the arc of American history.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., photographed in his Washington office on Jan. 22, 2013, a legend of the civil rights movement got his start as a college student in Nashville.

"It just reminds me that some of us gave a little blood on that bridge to redeem the soul of America, to make America better," Lewis said. 

Born the child of Alabama sharecroppers, he became the youngest of the "Big Six" civil rights leaders who spoke at the March on Washington in 1963. By the time he died, he was the elder statesman for a new generation of racial protests fueled by outrage over the murder of George Floyd and other unarmed Black men by police. His final public appearance was a quiet visit on a Sunday morning last month at Black Lives Matter Plaza across from the White House.

An outpouring of accolades and grief across partisan lines followed the announcement of his death.

Lewis leaves a formidable legacy not because of his personal eloquence – he lacked the inspirational oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. or Barack Obama – nor because of landmark legislation he drafted. Instead, he was a figure of moral authority, grounded in his adherence to principles of equal rights and nonviolent protest, and in his willingness to repeatedly put his life on the line in Selma and elsewhere.

"A biblical figure," said historian Jon Meacham, author of a biography of Lewis being published this fall. Many called him "the conscience of the Congress."

"I thought I was going to die on that bridge," Lewis said of the iconic Selma march, saying he expected it to be his final protest. The notion that down the road he might counsel presidents and serve in Congress for decades would have been unfathomable then.

"I would have said, 'You're crazy, you're out of your mind; you don't know what you're talking about,'" he told me.

Yet that is precisely what he did.

Obama's inscription: 'Because of you, John' 

Presidents knew his name.

As a young man, Lewis was one of a half-dozen civil rights leaders who met with John Kennedy in 1963 to tell him they were holding a March on Washington, news that the White House didn't welcome. Two years later, Lyndon Johnson presented him with one of the pens he used to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the photos of the brutal crackdown on the Edmund Pettus Bridge propelled its passage. As a congressman from Georgia, Lewis was an ally of Bill Clinton and an outspoken opponent of George W. Bush, a critic of his decision to invade Iraq.

On the day Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009, the nation's first African-American president, he presented Lewis with a photo inscribed: "Because of you, John."

More: Remembering Rep. John Lewis: A life in photos 

But a week before Donald Trump was sworn in, Lewis became the most prominent Democrat at that time to call him an illegitimate president, saying Russian interference had helped him win the office. 

Trump fired back. "Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to...mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results," the president-elect responded in a pair of tweets. "All talk, talk, talk - no action or results. Sad!" 

On Saturday morning, Trump ordered U.S. flags flown at half-staff on public buildings "as a mark of respect," albeit only until the end of the day. On Saturday afternoon, hours after the four living former presidents had all issued statements of personal remembrance, Trump posted a two-sentence tweet saying he was "saddened" to hear of Lewis' death.

"Melania and I send our prayers to he and his family," he wrote.

Lewis didn't seem particularly affected by praise – his awards included the Presidential Medal of Freedom – or by scorn. He was an implacable figure with a deep voice and a deliberate manner, unfailingly courteous to Capitol tourists who wanted to shake his hand. The determined expression he showed in the black-and-white TV footage at the Selma march is almost precisely the same as the one in photos of him standing on the "Black Lives Matter" mural across from the White House more than a half-century later, although his shoulders were a bit more stooped and his face more lined.

Never be afraid to 'make some noise'

For someone who spent his life getting into what he called "good trouble," he remained remarkably optimistic about the future of the country and the possibilities of protest. 

"Do not get lost in a sea of despair," he urged his supporters in 2018. "Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."

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Trump Weighs In on the Death of John Lewis, One of His Most Vocal Critics
Katie Rogers, NY Times (07/18/20)

WASHINGTON — The Republican governor of Georgia said that the country will “never be the same” without Representative John Lewis, who died Friday at age 80. The Democratic speaker of the house called Mr. Lewis “a titan of the civil rights movement.” The House minority leader said that Mr. Lewis “never stopped working to improve the lives of others.”

 President Trump on his way to the Trump Natio­nal Golf Club in Sterl­ing, Va., on Saturday.

As the bipartisan tributes to Mr. Lewis’s legacy began flowing late Friday evening and Saturday morning, President Trump opted to retweet a flurry of his older posts on Twitter largely focused on disparaging his enemies.

He slammed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, as corrupt. He called his niece, whose recently published book took an unflinching look at his character, a “mess.” He praised a guest host of Sean Hannity’s Fox News television show.

On Saturday afternoon, after issuing a boilerplate proclamation for flags to be flown Saturday at half-staff at the White House and public buildings, Mr. Trump published a perfunctory message on the passing of one of his most prominent critics.

“Saddened to hear the news of civil rights hero John Lewis passing,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter after finishing a game of golf. “Melania and I send our prayers to he and his family.”

Given their tense history, how Mr. Trump would comment on Mr. Lewis’s passing was an open question. Shortly before Mr. Trump posted his tweet about Mr. Lewis’s death, Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California, urged the president to not comment at all.

“@realDonaldTrump While the nation mourns the passing of a national hero, please say nothing,” Ms. Bass tweeted. “Please don’t comment on the life of Congressman Lewis. Your press secretary released a statement, leave it at that. Please let us mourn in peace.”

The two men have been at odds since before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, when Mr. Lewis questioned the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s election and said he would not be in attendance when the president-elect traveled to the Capitol to be sworn in.

“I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected,” Mr. Lewis said in a television interview days before Mr. Trump took office. “And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I don’t plan to attend the inauguration. It will be the first one that I miss since I’ve been in the Congress. You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.”

But Mr. Trump, an avid follower of his own news coverage, returned fire the next day, accusing Mr. Lewis of “falsely complaining about the election results” and questioning his leadership.

“Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!”

The president-elect’s comments about Mr. Lewis resulted in a torrent of messages from people who lived in Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, which is majority African-American and home to wealthy areas like Buckhead, as well as the world’s busiest airport and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Apparently still smarting from the snub, Mr. Trump followed up three days later, pointing out on Twitter that Mr. Lewis had also boycotted President George W. Bush’s inauguration.

 Representative John Lewis skipped President Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and was a persistent critic of his administration.

Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and son of sharecroppers, dedicated most of his life to fighting for racial equality, whether it was helping to organize the March on Washington in 1963 or supporting protesters calling for justice for George Floyd, who died in police custody in May. He was one of the original Freedom Riders, a group of activists who traveled throughout the American South to protest segregated buses and terminals.

On a march in Selma in 1965, he was beaten by police officers who left scars that would be visible for the rest of Mr. Lewis’s life. And he had little good to say about Mr. Trump’s views on race.

As protests roiled over the death of Mr. Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who died after being pinned under the knee of a white police officer, Mr. Lewis criticized Mr. Trump, who has threatened military action against peaceful protesters and encouraged police officers to be harsher on civilians.

“You cannot stop the call of history,” Mr. Lewis said last month, criticizing Mr. Trump’s enthusiasm for militarizing American cities. “You may use troopers, you may use fire hoses and water, but it cannot be stopped. There cannot be any turning back. We’ve come too far, made too much progress, to stop now or to go back. The world is seeing what is happening, and we are ready to continue to move forward.”

Mr. Lewis, whose colleagues called him “the conscience of Congress,” continued to be an outspoken voice against the administration. In 2018, he said that Mr. Trump was a racist when the president was reported to have referred to Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” and again when Mr. Trump said on Twitter that four Democratic congresswomen of color should “go back” to their home countries.

“I know racism when I see it,” Mr. Lewis said at the time, as the House voted on a resolution to condemn those tweets. “I know racism when I feel it. And at the highest level of our government, there’s no room for racism.”

When the House voted to impeach Mr. Trump in December 2019, Mr. Lewis, as he often did, framed the decision as a historical one.

“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something,” Mr. Lewis said on the House floor. “To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ For some, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”

The president has a history of ignoring, or even attacking, the legacies of his political foes. In 2018, Mr. Trump’s White House was harshly criticized for initially flying the American flag only briefly at half-staff after the death of Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, who was another vocal critic.

On the day of Mr. McCain’s funeral, Mr. Trump went golfing and tweeted conspiracy theories.

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John Lewis: Clyburn says best way to honor congressman is passage of voting rights bill
By Chandelis Duster, CNN (07/19/20)

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn on Sunday said the best way for President Donald Trump and Senate leadership to honor late Congressman John Lewis' life is to pass a bill in his name that would restore part of the Voting Rights Act.

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"I think that Trump and the Senate leadership, Mitch McConnell, by their deeds if they so celebrate the heroism of this man, then let's go to work and pass that bill because it's laid out the way the Supreme Court asked us to lay it out," the South Carolina Democrat and friend of Lewis told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of The Union." "And if the President were to sign that, then I think that's what we would do to honor John. It should be the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020. That's the way to do it. Words may be powerful, but deeds are lasting."

Lewis, a Democrat who served as the US representative for Georgia's 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, died Friday at age 80 after a six-month battle with cancer.

The son of sharecroppers, Lewis was a mantle of the civil rights movement and pushed for voting rights. At 25 years old, he helped lead a march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. On the that day, which became known as "Bloody Sunday," he and other marchers were brutally attacked by police who fractured his skull. Images from that day shocked the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

McConnell has refused to bring up for a vote legislation that would restore a key part of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. The House passed the measure in December with just one Republican vote. Meanwhile, Trump routinely tweets false information about mail-in voting as Republicans back restrictive voter identification laws around the country.

Trump tweeted on Saturday that he was "saddened to hear" about Lewis' death. He also ordered American flags to be flown at half-staff on Saturday "as a mark of respect for the memory and longstanding public service" of Lewis.

Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat, echoed Clyburn's sentiments on passing the voting legislation to honor Lewis during a separate interview with Tapper on Sunday and criticized the President's divisive rhetoric.

"I was hoping the President would not even tweet yesterday about John Lewis. At this point we don't need anybody's sympathies or tweets. What we need is action," Pressley said. "If you really want to honor the life of John Lewis, you don't do things like gut the fair housing laws. You don't sow the seeds of division. And you don't delay bringing the Voting Rights Advancement Act named after John Lewis to the floor. And that should be brought to the floor immediately."