John Lewis IV: Legacy

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A nation John Lewis helped unite salutes him on his final journey across Selma bridge
Adam Tamburin, Montgomery Advertiser (07/26/20)

SELMA, Ala. – This time, the state troopers saluted.

The casket carrying civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman John Lewis arrives at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Sunday July 26, 2020.

The late John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the final time Sunday in a triumphant celebration of his fight for civil rights, often in the face of violent resistance.

Mourners cheered, sang and cried as a horse-drawn carriage carried Lewis' flag-draped casket over the Alabama River and toward Montgomery.

Red rose petals led the way on this final journey, covering pavement that was stained with his blood when hordes of state troopers attacked him 55 years ago.

Lewis and hundreds of marchers came to the bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965 to demand an end to restrictions that blocked Black citizens from voting.  Law enforcement beat the peaceful protesters with clubs and showered them with tear gas.

U.S. Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis crosses the Edmund Pettus Bridge during his celebration of life ceremonies Sunday, July 26, 2020 in Selma, Ala..

Lewis and the others returned days later, marching from Selma to the Capitol in Montgomery to amplify their call for voting rights. Their work spurred national action that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act that year.

The sloping bridge in Selma became a symbol of the civil rights movement and of Lewis' perseverance. In 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, he walked the bridge arm-in-arm with President Barack Obama. 

Lewis' work continued for decades after Bloody Sunday, culminating in a lengthy tenure representing Atlanta in the U.S. House of Representatives. He died July 17 from pancreatic cancer at 80. His sprawling memorial tour reflected the scale of his impact. 

'A lot more bridges to cross'

He was honored as a hometown hero Saturday at Troy University in Alabama, a campus where he was never allowed to enroll because he was Black.

His funeral procession headed to Selma before retracing the route of his marches to Montgomery, where he lay in state at the Alabama Capitol. The funeral procession is to proceed to the U.S. Capitol in Washington, then to Atlanta this week.

Alabama State Troopers salute civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman John Lewis at the spot he was beaten by the same force during the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" Selma to Montgomery March the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on Saturday, July 26, 2020.

Lewis’ even-tempered leadership and persistence were emblematic of the civil rights movement that reshaped the Jim Crow South and laid the groundwork for generations of nonviolent protests against racism.

Memorial services and vigils this weekend celebrated Lewis’ unyielding commitment to the cause of equal rights.

Speakers and community members celebrated his legacy while urging a new generation of activists to step forward. Many said a new surge of activism surrounding Black Lives Matter and police violence underscored the urgency of the work.

"We have a lot more bridges to cross without John," U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., said Saturday during a service at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma.

Sewell called for renewal of the Voting Rights Act, some of which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. Lewis' example would lead the way, she said.

"John never gave up hope," she said. "His optimism is what he inspired in all of us. We're all infused with that optimism. Can't you hear him? Find a way to get in the way. Good trouble. Necessary trouble."

Justin Carter of Valdosta, Ga., waits near the Edmund Pettus Bridge before a procession carrying the body of John Lewis via horse-drawn carriage July 26 in Selma, Ala.

Mourners at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday echoed that message. Activist Sherrette Spicer said Lewis’ final journey over the bridge was a symbolic turning point for the movement he led.

“He started some great work that must be finished. He lit some great torches that we cannot let die,” she said. “We must continue to take them to those dark places, to bring people out of darkness.”

Toyia Stevenson of Indiana brought her two sons, ages 12 and 14, to honor Lewis on Sunday. As her sons get more involved in protests against police brutality and systemic racism, she wants them to understand the road map left by Lewis and other civil rights luminaries. 

"It's never the end," Stevenson said. "Just because he died doesn't mean his legacy died. His legacy lives on through us, and we have to protect it."

Lewis' resolve in face of adversity

As an elder of the civil rights movement, Lewis sought to harness the power of his own story to inspire new activists. His final journey through Alabama doubled as a dramatic retelling of that story.

It marked the Boy from Troy’s resolve in the face of adversity, retracing his path from a farm in rural Alabama to the heart of the civil rights movement – and to the halls of power in Washington.

Rev. Nathan Knight, chairman of DeKalb Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rev. Eric Terrell, vice president of National Action Network, and Delores Knight, DeKalb SCLC board member, stand outside the Alabama State Capitol to pay their respect to civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman John Lewis Sunday, July 26, 2020 in Montgomery, Ala.

Law enforcement agencies that once fought Lewis’ efforts honored them now, escorting his body from Troy to Selma, then to the state Capitol.

The journey pulled attention toward the pernicious and persistent racism Lewis battled all his life. His hearse wove past the sites of the first executive offices for the Confederacy, major slave trading hubs, lynchings and other painful reminders of the country's racist past.

It passed landmarks such as Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church and the Rosa Parks Museum, symbols of hard-fought victories against that searing oppression.

The sound of sirens pierced the air as the procession made its way through downtown Montgomery toward the Capitol.

Inside, Gov. Kay Ivey placed flowers in front of Lewis' casket before several members of Alabama's congressional delegation, including U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, circled the casket one last time. 

Peggy Wallace Kennedy, the daughter of former Gov. George Wallace, made a surprise appearance at the ceremony, emphasizing Lewis' ability to win unlikely allies.

Wallace stoked racist fervor in Alabama as a political strategy in the 1960s, defying voting and civil rights for Black people. He condemned the marches from Selma to Montgomery and encouraged law enforcement to stop the marches in the lead-up to Bloody Sunday.

Peggy Kennedy, daughter of former Governor George Wallace, pauses at the casket of civil rights icon and U.S. Congressman John Lewis at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Sunday July 26, 2020.

Kennedy has long been outspoken about grappling with her father's legacy, saying he was on the "wrong side" of history.

In 2019, Kennedy published a book about coming to grips with her family's segregationist past. She wrote of watching the Bloody Sunday march and reacting with horror, then keeping private when she saw the beating of the man she later learned was Lewis. 

In the book, Kennedy recalled holding hands with Lewis during the 44th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when she had been invited to speak.

“With his arm around me, John and I stepped to the bridge’s rail. ‘Peggy, crossing the bridge with you shows how far the human heart can go,’ ” she recalled Lewis saying.

Unfinished fight for justice

Lewis knew the fight for justice was unfinished. In his final years, he embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and efforts to increase gun control to curb violence.

For many who came to honor him this weekend, the end of his journey was a rallying cry.

Sonya Powell came to Selma this weekend with her mother, Lillie, 75, and her son, Julian, 14. She grew up in Lewis’ Atlanta district and wanted to pay her respects.

“For his entire, entire career he’s done nothing but take action,” Powell said Saturday.

Powell said a new wave of protests captured her young son’s attention. Lewis could be his guiding light, she said.

“The movement has really opened his eyes, and that has been great to hear. He wants to learn more about civil rights, to really understand it,” she said.

“Look around,” she said outside Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, which became a home base for Lewis and hundreds of protesters seeking voting rights in 1965.

“This is what working together looks like," she said. “This is what America looks like.”

Contributing: Brian Lyman, Melissa Brown, Holly Meyer, Brad Harper and Kirsten Fiscus

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Selma Helped Define John Lewis’s Life. In Death, He Returned One Last Time.
Rick Rojas, NY Times (07/25/20)

SELMA, Ala. — On a different Sunday in Selma, this one more than five decades ago, John Lewis was a 25-year-old activist wearing a long tan jacket and carrying a backpack, helping to marshal hundreds of demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were bombarded by clouds of tear gas and swarmed by state troopers wielding clubs, one of which fractured Mr. Lewis’s skull.

The body of John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday.

Mr. Lewis, who died on July 17, was carried by a horse-drawn caisson on Sunday across the bridge one last time. He was surrounded by mourners drawn to what felt like sacred ground. They were there to bid farewell to Mr. Lewis, who became a guiding force in the civil rights movement in no small part because of his role in the march for the right to vote on March 7, 1965.

“It’s as significant as the Battle of Gettysburg in the history of this country,” said Ralph Williams, who had traveled 100 miles from Jasper, Ala., with his family. “But only one side had weapons in this battle.”

Selma was a stop in valedictory pilgrimage retracing the arc of his life. The trek started on Saturday in Troy, the Alabama town near the cotton farm where he was raised, and continues this week onto Washington, where he served in Congress, and Atlanta, which became his home.

But the tribute in Selma did not simply mark Mr. Lewis’s final trip to a place he had embraced as a wellspring of renewal and inspiration, drawing him back year after year. It was also a tacit acknowledgment, tinged with sadness but also satisfaction, that the generation that had steered the civil rights fight in the 1960s was now past its twilight and another one was emerging to pilot the movement through its latest iteration.

“It is the young among us in Alabama and across this nation who can heal what we have failed to heal in our lifetimes, no matter how hard John tried,” Senator Doug Jones of Alabama, a Democrat, said during a memorial service on Saturday night, contending that Mr. Lewis had been heartened by the younger activists leading the Black Lives Matter effort.

“He confidently looked around and said, ‘All is well,’” Mr. Jones said. “It is time for the torch to be passed. It is time for me to let go.”

In Washington, his colleagues will surely trumpet his legislative achievements and the degree to which he was viewed as the conscience of Congress. In Atlanta, with his funeral scheduled on Thursday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, pastors and elected officials will try to synthesize the totality of his life and work.

But this final journey through Alabama has been about Mr. Lewis’s origin story.

“This is where it all started for him,” Hydreca Lewis-Brewster, one of his nieces, said after a Saturday morning service in Troy, where a crowd of hundreds filed past his coffin to pay their respects.

During the service, his family, local officials and pastors talked about his enduring connection to a town of roughly 19,000 people about an hour southeast of Montgomery, the state capital.

Many invoked Mr. Lewis’s message of “good trouble,” a belief that change can be propelled by a willingness to rebel against an oppressive system, even in the face of steep consequences.

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“Good trouble allowed John to cross bridges blockaded by legalized lynchmen who were inspired by the false notion of racial supremacy,” said the Rev. Darryl Caldwell, the pastor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in the tiny town of Banks, just outside Troy.

“Thank you, father of all mercy, for John,” he went on, “who wore the mantle of good trouble and did not flinch in the face of fear when confronted by deputized demons who intended to discourage, deny and ultimately destroy the just course of John Robert Lewis.”

Henry Lewis, one of his brothers, who goes by Grant, remembered standing near his brother as he was sworn into Congress. Mr. Lewis looked in his direction and gave him a thumbs up. Later, Grant asked his brother what he had meant with the gesture. “This is a long way from the cotton fields of Alabama,” Mr. Lewis told him.

Mr. Lewis was rooted in a community that has been shaped by an inheritance of trauma, handed down through generations of slavery, segregation and disenfranchisement, yet just as much by a deep pride in the movement that rose up in defiance of that oppression.

He had been a link binding the legacy of the past to the protests of the present. His death was book ended by that of C.T. Vivian, another civil rights leader and associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who died on July 17, and that of Charles Evers, who died on July 22 and was a pioneering figure in Mississippi who stepped up after the 1963 assassination of his brother Medgar.

“If we don’t carry on,” said the Rev. Dr. Jacquelyn L. Lancaster-Denson, a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Alabama, “he got in good trouble for nothing.”

The services drew many who had only fleeting interactions with Mr. Lewis, if they had ever met him at all, but nevertheless felt a bond with him.

“He always made you feel like you were somebody,” said Pasay Davidson, a fourth-grade teacher from Ozark, Ala.

Sharon Calkins-Tucker identified with him, she said, because she was also outspoken. “Without us,” she said, “nothing would get out and nothing would ever change.”

The hearse left Troy and traversed a winding route of country roads to Selma, a city of nearly 18,000 west of Montgomery on the Alabama River. It passed rows of modest family homes and churches but also evidence that time had not been charitable, like the industrial ruins and collapsing houses being swallowed by nature.

Political and civil rights leaders gathered with his family on Saturday night at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church — the starting point for the protest — walking from Selma to Montgomery.

“We in Selma were blessed to know John intimately,” said Representative Terri A. Sewell, a Democrat whose congressional district includes Selma, adding that the community had walked “in his footsteps year after year after year.”

On the street in front of the church were charter buses that had been packed with church groups from Georgia and satellite trucks from national news organizations. A line of people waiting to see his body snaked down the street.

Up the block, a group of men pitched a tent on the sidewalk for a fish fry, just as they have every Saturday for a few weeks. They started doing it as a way to fill the time left empty by coronavirus lockdowns, and on Saturday, they stayed long after dark, unspooling the world’s problems as they usually do.

They described the frustration that comes with living in a city that, for outsiders, was a living museum of one of its darkest days. It was also surreal, they said, to see the bridge, long taken for granted as a piece of the local landscape, becoming a marker of such important history.

“We went across that bridge 30 times a day and it didn’t mean anything,” said one of the men, an 82-year-old who only gave his first name, Artie. He said he had grown up in Selma, left for New York City for four decades, then returned home.

The men acknowledged the progress they said the bloodshed in Selma helped bring about: securing voting rights and creating more economic and educational opportunity. Yet they noted the biases that remain difficult to scrub away.

“The faces and the names have changed, but the game is still the game,” said a man who gave his name as Roy, and who moved to Selma from Montgomery 12 years ago.

Still, the bridge, which crosses the Alabama River and is named for a Confederate Army commander who later served in the U.S. Senate, carries enormous significance.

The bloodstained march had left an indelible impression on Mr. Lewis. At Comic-Con in San Diego in 2016, he led children on a march through the convention center, cosplaying himself, with a jacket similar to the one he wore in 1965 and a backpack with an apple, an orange, a toothbrush and books, like he had then.

He returned to the city regularly. “We come to Selma to be renewed,” he said at a 50th anniversary event in 2015. “We come to be inspired.”

And in March, after he learned he had pancreatic cancer, a crowd engulfed him on the bridge, and they hushed to hear him speak. “I thought I was going to die on this bridge,” he said.

“Go out there,” he told them in his raspy voice. “Speak up, speak out! Get in the way, get in good trouble! Necessary trouble! And help redeem the soul of America.”

For the final visit on Sunday, a crowd had assembled for him yet again. Some had marched with him or were related to him, and many more had only known him from a distance.

“It’s an incomparable legacy,” said Donta Williams, who had traveled from Jasper with her father, Mr. Williams, and the rest of her family, who all wore T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “good trouble.”

Waiting on the other side of the bridge was a contingent of law enforcement officers, including the successors of the Alabama state troopers Mr. Lewis had faced in 1965. But this time, they stood at attention as the caisson approached, there to usher Mr. Lewis along as he made his way to Montgomery.

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The 'Good Trouble' man
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), Opinion Contributor, The Hill (07/25/20)

One of the high-water marks of my life was the considerable amount of time during my youthful years I spent in the company of some of this nation's most significant souls of the last century. Those names include: Dr. Ralph David Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, C.K. Steele, James Lawson, C.T Vivian, Joseph E. Lowery, C.L. Franklin, and, of course, John R. Lewis. All but John Lewis were members of the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), of which I became the Mid-West Regional Vice President and founder of several chapters, including the affiliate in Kansas City, Mo. Looking back at that time reminds me of the words recorded in Genesis 6:4: "There were giants in the earth in those days."


John Lewis was-at a whopping 5'9''-unmistakably a giant among giants.

Although John was one of the founders of the more aggressive Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he never strayed too far from friend Dr. Martin Luther King, the president of SCLC. I first met John during the late '70s when he briefly attended the Birmingham, Ala., convention of the SCLC, hosted by Dr. Nelson "Fireball" Smith and the Pilgrim Baptist Church.

My memory of that first meeting is so clear. I spoke to John in the vestibule of the church as the conference recessed for lunch. I nervously said, "hello, sir, my name is Emanuel Cleaver." He not only returned the greeting, but, as I thought to myself, "yea I am reverend nobody," he lingered and called me, "young brother" and asked from where I had come. John awarded me, with his courtesy, a major moment in my young life. I believed then that I was truly in the presence of pure-hearted humility. And after more than 40 years of friendship, I still believe it.

I do wonder, after all these years, whether he knows my real name. Because, although we both have changed quite a bit since those painfully exciting early days, the last time we spoke he still referred to me as "young brother." While Father Time may have taken its toll on our physical beings, the one thing that did not change was his immaculate humility.

After receiving just about every major award imaginable, he died without realizing his specialness. During my meditation on the day after John's death, it occurred to me that a lion never struts to get attention, and make no mistake, John was a lion all the way to the end. The great poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "a great man is always willing to be little." That causes me to wonder if he knew that one day, way down in the Mississippi Delta, John Lewis would be born.

As the moral leader of the Democratic caucus, John always urged, "Be bold!" That is the reason Democrats pushed hard to get the Affordable Care Act passed into law. It was his demand for boldness that pushed the Congressional Black Caucus to develop and usher through the House, The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Finally, John Lewis constantly urged young people to get into "Good Trouble." By that, he meant that if they saw wrong, they must seek to make it right. If they saw war, they must try to stop it. If they saw poverty, they must work to end it. He warned that those actions would surely generate a strong and hostile counteraction. It will get you in trouble, Lewis would teach. But that is "Good Trouble," and there is a sacredness in standing up against wrong.

In his very last public act of Good Trouble, John Lewis, the lion in winter, joined young activists at the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. He spoke of peace even in the midst of a creeping militarism. He spoke of unity at a time when outside forces seek to divide. And he spoke of love as our guiding light through the darkest of times.

As this next generation of Americans take their stand against institutional inequalities and march against the injustices in our society, I can only hope that they will give attention to the treasure trove of lessons left behind in news reels, books, speeches, interviews, and oral presentations from the friends and family of the "Good Trouble" Man, John R. Lewis.

Cleaver represents the 5th District of Missouri and served as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus from 2011-2013.

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6-day celebration of life for Rep. John Lewis begins Saturday
ABC News (07/25/20)

The late Rep. John Lewis -- a civil rights and voting rights icon known as the "conscience of the U.S. Congress" -- will cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, for a final time this weekend.

 Civil Rights icon Congressman John Lewis pauses during a memorial ceremony on Capitol Hill on Oct. 24, 2019, in Washington.

It's part of a six-day celebration of life paying tribute to his legacy beginning on Saturday in his hometown of Troy, Alabama. Over the next week, Lewis will lie in state at the U.S. Capitol, Alabama State Capitol and Georgia State Capitol.

MORE: John Lewis, Civil Rights activist and Congressman from American civil rights leader and activist John Lewis

A public service celebrating "The Boy from Troy" will take place Saturday morning at Troy University, where Lewis will lie in repose in the afternoon. Saturday evening, a private ceremony will honor Lewis at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma ahead of another public viewing.

On Sunday morning, a procession will be held across the bridge in Selma where Lewis and other voting rights demonstrators were beaten 55 years ago on "Bloody Sunday." Sunday's march from Brown Chapel to the Edmund Pettus Bridge is titled "#Good Trouble: Courage, Sacrifice & the Long March for Freedom."

Lewis will lie in state at the Alabama State Capitol following the procession.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced late Thursday that Lewis will be honored in a private ceremony in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Monday, followed by an unprecedented public viewing taking place outside, as opposed to inside, the Capitol building due to coronavirus concerns on Monday night and Tuesday.

MORE: House holds emotional moment of silence to honor John Lewis

According to the lawmakers' joint statement, face masks will be required and social distancing will be "strictly enforced."

The office of the late Rep. John Lewis is draped in black fabric at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, July 23, 2020.

The Georgia Democrat will be the second Black lawmaker to lie in state at the Capitol, a tribute reserved for the most revered Americans, following the late Rep. Elijah Cummings who died last October.

There will also be a procession through Washington, D.C. next week, details of which his family will announce, where the public can pay their respects "in a socially-distant manner."

On Wednesday, Lewis will lie in state at the Georgia State Capitol.

MORE: The two versions of John Lewis' March on Washington speech reveal the complexity of a young leader

Lewis will be laid to rest on Thursday at South View Cemetery in Atlanta following a private funeral at Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once led. A military honor guard will accompany Lewis' body during all the events.

Rep. John Lewis crosses the Edmund Pettus Bridge before the 55th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday crossing, in Selma, Ala., March 1, 2020.

Citing coronavirus precautions, Lewis' family has asked members of the public not travel from across the country to pay their respects. They instead have suggested people pay tribute online using the hashtags #BelovedCommunity and #HumanDignity. The ceremonies will be live-streamed on multiple platforms, including ABC News Live.

His family also encouraged the public to tie a blue or purple ribbon on their front doors or in their yards to commemorate Lewis' life.

Lewis, 80, died last Friday, after a months-long battle with pancreatic cancer. The civil rights icon served 17 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives serving the 5th Congressional District of Georgia.

MORE: John Lewis, congressman and civil rights icon, dies at 80

His final public appearance was a visit on to the Black Lives Matter Plaza across from the White House on June 7.

ABC News' John Parkinson and Mariam Khan contributed to this report.

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The great legacy of John Lewis
Jo Deutsch, opinion contributor, The Hill (07/21/20)

Since I have spent years fighting for justice on Capitol Hill, I traveled the same path as John Lewis frequently. Whether it was advocating for workers, the freedom to marry or teaching our children about fighting for what is right and just, over my 30 years as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, he was always at my side. His lifetime of work fighting for equal access to the vote has become the core mission of my job. I am dedicated to carrying on his legacy on voting rights as I fight for these key democracy issues. I will miss having him by my side and hearing his voice. He will remain one of the most remarkable men I have ever had the opportunity to work with.

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I started to get to know Congressman Lewis as a new lobbyist for the Association of Flight Attendants. My first major fight was against Goliath: the tobacco industry. Flight attendants were sick and dying from working in smoke-filled airplanes. I was fighting for their health and the health of all airline travelers. At the time, the tobacco industry was dominant in Georgia, and Lewis did not vote with the union. We reminisced decades later about how difficult this fight was, long after the airline smoking ban passed.For years after, he always graciously accepted my invitations to speak to my children and their friends. First, he came to my son Matthew's elementary school driving from the Capitol to Prince George's County, Maryland. He walked into the auditorium where the kids sat in a circle on the hard wooden floor. He immediately kneeled down to be eye to eye with the kids. For almost an hour, he stayed in that position talking to the kids about his life experiences and the power of the civil rights movement. He answered questions and was totally engaged with the enthralled group of children. I was amazed by his flexibility when he stood back up again.

In another special encounter, he stopped in the Capitol as then Representative Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin was escorting a group from Rainbow Families. It was a Saturday morning, the Capitol was quiet. Despite his casual attire, he never missed the chance to be in touch with young people. He stopped and talked about the civil rights movement and his Congressional work. He talked about Bloody Sunday and being attacked on the Edmund Pettus bridge. He silenced the squirmy kids with his stories, leadership, passion and commitment, urging us to join him in fighting the good fight. He made the kids laugh by telling them to get into "good trouble."

He was there for me again, as I fought for the freedom to marry. He accepted a request to film a video for the freedom to marry. Along with the film crew, we listened intently as he described the amazing pictures in his office - showing key times from his life. It was the first time I got to hear him tell the story about preaching to chickens! His passion for fighting for people showed through in each special encounter I was privileged to have with him.

The last time I had a chance to see him in person was at a press conference the day the Voting Rights Advancement Act was being voted on in the House. It was shortly before he announced he had cancer. He spoke, as always, passionately and brilliantly. People circled around him after to shake his hand. He was so gracious and loving to everyone who wanted to talk to him. Later that day, he would hold the gavel to announce the passage of the bill.

I was moved to tears when I saw him on television at the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington last month. There stood a thinner Lewis, wearing a 1619 hat, still present in the fight. Now it is time to continue the fight to honor his memory. It is time to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which will safeguard democracy and ensure that all Americans have the ability to vote. The VRAA would overturn the damage done by the Supreme Court's 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision stopped years of progress to access the ballot box for Black, Brown, Native and Asian American people.

The Shelby decision has led to a spike in legal roadblocks in the years since. States have passed felony disenfranchisement laws, restrictive voter identification laws, and closed polling locations in predominantly Black and Brown communities, among other things. As Lewis said, "We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it." Fighting for the passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act would carry on his legacy. We can and must do it for John Lewis.

Jo Deutsch is director of legislative strategy with Campaign Legal Center.

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'It's a Picture of Someone Who Knows Who He Is.' The Story Behind TIME's Commemorative John Lewis Cover
Olivia B. Waxman, Time (07/21/20)

In 1963, Steve Schapiro, then 28, was on assignment for LIFE magazine, photographing prominent civil rights activists, from James Baldwin to Fannie Lou Hamer. One day, while following Jerome Smith, a participant in the Freedom Rides that raised awareness of interstate bus segregation, he went to Clarksdale, Miss., to document one of the many training sessions that were taking place in church basements across the South. In those meetings, volunteers studied how to react to the racism they would encounter in their work. That day in Clarksdale, as Schapiro watched a line of ministers file into the church, he noticed among the group another well-known Freedom Rider, in a tie and button-down shirt: John Lewis. He asked Lewis if he could take his photo, and the young man agreed.

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Weeks later, Lewis would become the youngest person on the speakers’ slate at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, addressing some 250,000 people from the Lincoln Memorial as the chairperson of the student arm of the 1960s civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lewis, then 23, went on to represent Atlanta in Congress for three decades until July 17, when he died at the age of 80 after a battle with cancer. The picture Schapiro shot more than half a century ago is featured on the cover of the Aug. 3-10 issue of TIME, which dives into Lewis’s life, career and legacy.

“You can feel the determination in him to be who he is,” Schapiro tells TIME, reflecting on the photograph. “In this picture, you see he’s looking forward with an enormous amount of strength, in terms of how he sees the future. It’s a picture of someone who knows who he is, knows what he has to do, and for the rest of his life, after this picture, he did it.”

After that moment, Schapiro kept following the civil rights movement, too. He would go on to cover the March on Washington and voter registration efforts throughout the South. He covered the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., photographing Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and Rosa Parks. LIFE also sent him to Memphis to cover the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. In recent years, Schapiro, now 85 and living in Chicago, has covered the Black Lives Matter movement.

Schapiro says Lewis saw the photo in 2014, after the Monroe Gallery exhibited it, and Schapiro sent Lewis a signed copy. Then, in 2015, Schapiro saw the Congressman in person for the first time since 1963. As the nation marked the 50th anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, the two saw each other at different events where veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement gathered. Lewis told Schapiro that 1963 image was one of his favorite photos of himself; Schapiro says that earlier this year, aides to Lewis reached out to him requesting a version of the photo for a belated birthday party for the Congressman.

Schapiro hopes the TIME cover will inspire young people to pick up Lewis’ lifelong fight for racial equality and human rights.

“This is who he was in his time,” the photographer says. “Let’s see who you are in your time.”

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C.T. Vivian was a giant figure in the civil rights movement: 5 things you may not have known about him
Lorenzo Reyes, USA TODAY, USA TODAY (07/22/20)

C.T. Vivian, the late civil rights activist and close adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., will be remembered in a private funeral service Thursday in Atlanta.

Vivian was a monumental figure in the Civil Rights Movement, with a stretch of advocating for racial equality for more than six decades from his first sit-in demonstrations in the 1940s in Peoria, Illinois. He met King soon after the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. 

Civil rights activist C.T. Vivian poses in his home in Atlanta on Jan. 4, 2012. On July 17, 2020, Vivian died at age 95

Vivian died of natural causes July 17 at age 95 at his home in Atlanta. It was the same day that fellow civil rights leader U.S. Rep. John Lewis died.

Here are five things to know about Vivian.

1. Vivian first led a sit-in in 1947

While working in his first professional job as a recreation director for the Carver Community Center in Peoria, Illinois, Vivian led his first-ever sit-in.

The demonstrations aimed to desegregate Peoria's Barton’s Cafeteria and served as a pivotal moment in Vivian's career as an activist, marking the first time he used non-violent, direct-action movement to spur change. It would not be the last time he would do so.

While studying at American Baptist College in Nashville, Vivian teamed with future civil rights leaders Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, James Forman and John Lewis – who would go on to become a congressman – for a non-violent march. On April 19, 1960, Vivian was one of around 4,000 demonstrators who marched on City Hall in Nashville and persuaded then-Mayor Ben West to publicly agree that racial discrimination was morally wrong.

Black leaders march down Jefferson Street at the head of a group of 3000 demonstrators April 19, 1960, and heading toward City Hall on the day of the Z. Alexander Looby bombing. In the first row, are the Rev. C.T. Vivian, left, Diane Nash of Fisk, and Bernard Lafayette of American Baptist Seminary. In the second row are Kenneth Frazier and Curtis Murphy of Tennessee A&I, and Rodney Powell of Meharry. Using his handkerchief in the third row is the Rev. James Lawson, one of the advisors to the students.

2. Vivian participated in Freedom Rides, marched in Selma

Vivian participated in the Freedom Rides to Mississippi in 1961 as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Upon arriving in Jackson, Mississippi, Vivian was arrested. 

RIP C.T. Vivian, pictured here after being arrested in Jackson, Mississippi during a Freedom Ride in 1961

Two years later, King appointed Vivian the national director of affiliates of the SCLC.

Then, in an incident Vivian is perhaps best known for, Vivian challenged Sheriff Jim Clark on the steps of the courthouse in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 during a drive to promote Black people to register to vote.

C.T. Vivian, integration leader, left, leads a prayer on the courthouse steps in Selma, Ala. on Feb. 5, 1965, after Sheriff James Clark, background with helmet, stopped him at the door with a court order. Vivian led hundreds of demonstrators armed with petitions asking longer voter registration hours. Clark arrested them when they refused to disperse

"You can turn your back on me, but you cannot turn your back upon the idea of justice," Vivian said to Clark as reporters recorded the interaction. "You can turn your back now and you can keep the club in your hand, but you cannot beat down justice. And we will register to vote, because as citizens of these United States we have the right to do it."

The footage shows Clark striking Vivian, who falls to the ground. Vivian is seen gathering himself and standing, before continuing his argument.

Shortly after the incident on the courthouse steps, thousands marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to bring awareness to racial inequities. And by the end of the year, Congress would pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

3. King called him 'the greatest preacher to ever live'

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once described Vivian, one of his closest advisers and confidants in the non-violent movement for racial equality, as "the greatest preacher to ever live."

After Vivian left King's organization, he went on to write "Black Power and the American Myth," the first book about the civil rights movement to be published by one of King's aides.

“It was Martin Luther King who removed the Black struggle from the economic realm and placed it in a moral and spiritual context,” Vivian wrote in his book. “It was on this plane that The Movement first confronted the conscience of the nation.”

The Rev. C. T. Vivian, far left, stands by former President Bill Clinton after his induction into the Voting Rights Hall of Fame, Sunday March 4, 2007 in Selma, Ala. At right is the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Vivian advised Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on civil rights issues.

4. Vivian was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom

U.S. President Barack Obama awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to C.T. Vivian in the East Room at the White House on November 20, 2013 in Washington, DC. The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the nation's highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.

In 2013, Obama honored Vivian with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The nation's highest civilian honor, it is given to those who have made "meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."

Vivian was honored Nov. 20 of that year alongside 15 others, including former President Bill Clinton, broadcaster Oprah Winfrey, journalist Ben Bradlee and feminist and author Gloria Steinem.

"The Baptist minister C.T. Vivian was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest advisers," Obama said Nov. 20, 2013, during the ceremony. "Martin taught us, he says, that it's in the action that we find out who we really are. And time and again, Rev. Vivian was one of the first to be in the action."  

5. Vivian created program that later became Upward Bound 

The year after his work to promote Black voter registration in Selma, Alabama, Vivian designed, organized and launched VISION in the summer of 1966, an educational program that helped 700 students in the state to attend college on scholarships.

VISION later became Upward Bound, a national program run through the U.S. Department of Education that supports high school students from low-income families and those in which neither parent holds a college degree. Upward Bound offers support to help those students graduate from high school and pursue college educations.

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John Lewis’ Fight for Equality Was Never Limited to Just the United States
Keisha N. Blain, Time (07/21/20)

In the wake of the recent passing of John Lewis, much of the coverage of the 80-year-old Congressman’s life has been centered on his work to advance the U.S. civil rights movement and his dedication to advancing Black rights and freedom in the United States. And with good reason: Lewis emerged on the national scene during the late 1950s when he helped to organize sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the Jim Crow South, and participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides, joining hundreds of volunteers who traveled throughout the South to challenge segregated bus terminals. He then went on to speak at the 1963 March on Washington and participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery, Ala., march.

American Civil Rights activist (and future politician) John Lewis, chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), in an office in New York City, 1964.

Yet Lewis was also a vocal champion in a struggle for human rights that went far beyond the borders of the United States. As he worked to transform American society and advance Black voting rights, Lewis never lost sight of global developments. He often reminded activists that the challenges Black Americans encountered were inextricably linked to freedom struggles abroad, and a full recounting of his legacy requires seeing his work within that global context.

Lewis’ internationalist vision was significantly shaped by his earliest experiences in the movement. In 1958, Guinea had declared its independence from France, signifying a triumph in the fight to end colonialism in Africa. Following independence, Black activists traveled to Guinea to witness firsthand the building of a postcolonial socialist nation. Lewis was one of them: In 1964, he traveled to Guinea, along with ten other activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). With the help of civil rights activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte, the group boarded a flight from New York City to Conakry, Guinea’s capital.  They planned to be in Guinea for three weeks, with plans to meet with the nation’s first president, Sékou Touré.

During their 1964 trip, Lewis and his colleagues in SNCC met with Guinean activists and several government leaders, including President Touré and Diallo Alpha, then-Director General of the Ministry of Information and Tourism. These meetings provided a significant opportunity for Lewis and his colleagues to engage in meaningful dialogue with Guinean leaders about African liberation movements. So moved by this experience, Lewis and fellow SNCC activist Donald Harris extended their stay in Africa for another month and a half–with plans to travel across the continent. In the weeks to follow, they visited Liberia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Egypt and Zambia. In one instance, they attended an independence celebration in Zambia–in the presence of more than 175,000 people and Kenneth Kaunda, the newly elected president of Zambia.

While in Africa, Lewis also unexpectedly crossed paths with Malcolm X at an airport in Nairobi, Kenya. Their unexpected encounter marked the beginning of a relationship between SNCC and the black nationalist leader. As SNCC began to embrace a more militant and internationalist platform, they drew heavily on Malcolm’s teachings.

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Lewis’ trip across Africa and his dialogues and exchanges with African activists and leaders was transformative. He was deeply inspired by their victories and emboldened in his political work. In the years to follow, he also became more vocal about the need to link national concerns to global ones.

That connection was already clear on March 7, 1965, when Lewis joined hundreds of activists peacefully crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in an attempt to bring greater attention to the movement for civil rights. They were viciously beaten by state troopers. The incident, dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” left Lewis with a concussion and fractured skull. In a speech delivered shortly before he was admitted to a local hospital, Lewis pointed out the hypocrisy of American foreign policy: “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam—I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo—I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma.”

Likewise, Lewis was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War before SNCC as an organization officially took a position on the matter. “Beyond the fact that warfare of any kind contradicts my position of nonviolence,” he later explained in his autobiography, he took issue with this war in particular. “It seemed extremely contradictory to me for President Johnson to be sending tens of thousands of troops to fight this war in Vietnam to ‘protect the rights’ of the people of South Vietnam at the same time as the rights of black people across the nation continued to be violated without protection.” He emphasized this point in several speeches across the U.S. South in 1965, drawing parallels between Selma and Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam.

Following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis went on to pursue a career in public office, and brought his international perspective with him. In 1986 he was elected to the House of Representatives–a seat he held for 33 years. His caucus and committee memberships alone captured the breadth of his political commitments. As a Congressman, Lewis was involved in the Native American Caucus, the Caucus on Human Trafficking, and the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. He was also involved in dozens of additional committees and caucuses that worked to address the needs of people across the globe, including those in Turkey, Brazil, Pakistan, Morocco, Panama, and India.

Lewis continued to advance this work during the 1990s, when he was involved in a number of Congressional initiatives aimed at addressing the needs of marginalized groups in various parts of the globe. In October 1992, for example, he sponsored the Concurrent Resolution before the 102nd Congress on the “humanitarian crisis in Somalia.” While the decision to aid the famine-stricken African nation was a controversial one as it amplified U.S. military presence abroad, Lewis prioritized addressing the loss of human life as a result of drought, famine and civil war. Two years later, when President Bill Clinton was considering an armed invasion of Haiti, Lewis was the only member of Black Caucus to openly oppose it, expressing concern about human rights violations and Haiti’s autonomy. Years later, Lewis was arrested while protesting genocide in Sudan in 2006. Along with other congressional allies, Lewis spent his last ten years in Congress pushing for the “Gandhi-King Scholarly Exchange Initiative Act,” an effort to advance the research and study of civil and human rights.

John Lewis held on to these ideals until the very end. He left a powerful legacy of advancing not just civil rights but also human rights—extending the focus of his work beyond the United States. By linking national concerns to global ones, Lewis compelled others to see that the problems of racism and white supremacy were not contained within U.S. borders. He emphasized the need to respond globally—to forge transnational political collaborations in order to effectively build a more just and equal society. “We are one people, one family, the human family,” he once remarked, “and what affects one of us affects us all.”

Historians’ perspectives on how the past informs the present

Keisha N. Blain is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). She is the author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom.

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How John Lewis spent his life bridging America’s racial and political divides
Phillip Morris, National Geographic (07/20/20)

Upon learning of the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013, John Lewis offered a moving tribute to South Africa’s first Black president. His written homage offered compelling insight into the minds of both of the storied civil rights leaders.

Congressman John Lewis stands in his office in Washington D.C. in September 2018.

“The first time I had a chance to meet him was in South Africa after his release from prison. He gave me this unbelievable hug. I will never forget it,” Lewis recalled in a statement released by his congressional office. “He said, ‘John Lewis, I know all about you. You inspired us.’ I said, ‘No, Mr. Mandela, you inspired us.’ I felt unworthy really to be standing at his side. I knew I was in the presence of greatness.”

John Lewis, left, marches with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, fourth from left, and other civil rights leaders as they lead a crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, on August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C.

Few contemporary Americans were better qualified than John Lewis to speak on greatness or reflect on the virtues of leadership and bravery. Before pancreatic cancer claimed him last week at the age of 80, Lewis was the living embodiment of those qualities. Tributes in his honor now abound, while flags fly at half-staff. Lewis is being widely remembered as a towering figure in America’s civil rights movement and the conscience of the United States Congress. However, there’s more to his considerable legacy. Lewis was also a bridge—a human bridge—that history will judge reverently.

("We have to believe that we’re one people, one family." Lewis reflects on his historic life in this 2018 interview with our editor-in-chief.)

The life of Lewis spans America’s violently segregated past, as well as the racially combustible moment we currently occupy. Born the son of Alabama sharecroppers, he was hand-selected by the Congress of Racial Equality to become one of the original 13 Freedom Riders. The riders were an integrated group of young people who rode interstate buses with the intention of directly confronting segregation in public transportation. The practice of segregated seating on buses had been outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956, but the ban was rarely enforced in the South.

John Lewis sits among civil rights leaders during a 1964 Civil Rights summit. Seated from left to right are Bayard Rustin; Jack Greenberg, NAACP; Whitney Young, Jr., National Urban League; James Farmer, CORE; Roy Wilkins, NAACP; Martin Luther King, SCLC; John Lewis, SNCC; and A. Philip Randolph, National Negro Labor Council. Lewis was one of the “Big Six” organizers of the 1963 March on Washington.

As a result of his activism on bus lines and through his work with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis became the target of frequent physical attacks. He paid a horrendous price in blood and numerous incarcerations for his non-violent advocacy seeking the integration of water fountains, diners, and other staples of daily living. Some of his committed colleagues paid with their lives. Somehow, Lewis survived. He eventually became a justice sentinel recognized by many, including the likes of Mandela.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and Congressman John Lewis stand in Black Lives Matter Plaza, in front of the White House, on June 7, 2020.

As his life’s end approached, Lewis remained active and vocal in the pursuit of racial justice. Although his body weakened, he continued to closely examine the nation’s landscape and forcefully speak out against injustice. He recognized that his life’s work must continue, and he seemed to take comfort in the growing coalitions of young Americans committed to challenging systemic racial unfairness. He could clearly see that the bridge his life represented was being navigated by the next generation.

The horror of watching the death of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street this past May transported Lewis back to childhood and the adolescent years before his life became synonymous with a dogged pursuit of social justice. The 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta was also on Lewis’s mind.

“I was 15 years old—just a year older than him. Despite real progress, I can’t help but think of young Emmett today as I watch video after video after video of unarmed Black Americans being killed and falsely accused. My heart breaks,” said Lewis days after Floyd’s death.

But then—just as he had done all of his life—John Lewis provided leadership. Speaking to those actively engaged in the continuing quest for justice, as well as to future leaders in formation, Lewis said:

“My fellow Americans, this is a special moment in our history. Just as people of all faiths and no faiths, and all backgrounds, creeds, and colors banded together decades ago to fight for equality and justice in a peaceful, orderly, non-violent fashion, we must do so again. Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand-up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive. History has proved time and again that non-violent, peaceful protest is the way to achieve the justice and equality that we all deserve.”

Given the social and racial unrest currently roiling America, the wisdom and patriotism of Lewis has never rung truer. It’s easy or convenient to forget that Lewis—trained in the ways of non-violent confrontation so effectively used by Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—wasn’t always a disciple of carefully nuanced language. However, he always understood the importance of youth—even intemperate youthful energy—in the civil rights arena. Perhaps that’s why he championed the activism of Black Lives Matter, and appeared to view the group as a viable successor to the justice movement.

On a day known as Bloody Sunday, on March 7, 1965 in Selma, Alabama, John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (in the foreground), had his skull fractured as he was beaten by a state trooper during a march in support of voting rights. Lewis went on to serve 17 terms in the United States Congress. He died Friday, July 17, 2020.

In early June, well into the final stage of his battle with cancer, Lewis donned a mask and paid a visit to the newly named Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C., near the White House. He toured the plaza with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and praised the mayor’s embrace of BLM’s call for sustained protest. As he viewed the words Black Lives Matter emblazoned on the street in large yellow letters, he was moved. He described the insignia as a “powerful work of art.” He was confirming yet again his long-held convictions of the power of the young to foment change. (Hear from those calling for racial justice in Washington.)

President Barack Obama awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S., to Congressman John Lewis during a 2011 ceremony at the White House.

When he spoke at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963—where King delivered his famous “I Have A Dream Speech”—Lewis, then only 23, had initially planned to address the crowd using language that the march organizers considered inflammatory.

The original ending of Lewis’s speech read: “The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.” (Here's how Jim Crow laws created "slavery by another name.")

Lewis’s elders in the movement, and the key organizers of the march—including A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and King—insisted that the SNCC leader temper his rhetoric a bit. There were bridges to be built and fragile cross-racial alliances to strengthen in America, where legalized racism remained entrenched. Lewis resisted mightily at first, but he ultimately relented. The crowd of 250,000 people heard the young activist end his speech with these words: “But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.”

A major turning point in the civil rights movement involving Lewis occurred on March 7, 1965. The day is commonly referred to as Bloody Sunday. Lewis and nearly 600 people gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and attempted to march across the bridge, named for a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The protestors were demanding the elimination of literacy tests and other practices used to deny Blacks the right to vote.

The peaceful demonstration descended into bloody chaos when troopers on horseback wielding bullwhips, rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire, and deploying tear gas charged at the marchers. No deaths resulted that day, but numerous marchers suffered broken bones. Footage televised on national news showed Lewis being cracked in the skull and knocked to the ground by an Alabama state trooper, who struck him a second time as he attempted to rise.

The national outrage was instant and galvanized political support. Less than ten days later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, a measure that banned the use of literacy tests and poll taxes that were widely used to prevent blacks from voting in many state and local elections in the South.

Weeks before Lewis died, an online petition was created to rename the Alabama bridge where Bloody Sunday occurred. The renaming effort has drawn considerable social media support, along with the strong endorsement of Lewis’s longtime friend and House of Representative colleague James Clyburn of South Carolina.

However, Lewis may have taken issue with the bridge being offered as a tribute to his legacy. In an AL.com newspaper commentary he co-authored with U.S. Representative Terri Sewell in 2015, Lewis spoke against the possible renaming of the Edmund Pettus bridge:

“Renaming the bridge will never erase its history. Instead of hiding our history behind a new name we must embrace it—the good and the bad. The historical context of the Edmund Pettus Bridge makes the events of 1965 even more profound. The irony is that a bridge named after a man who inflamed racial hatred is now known worldwide as a symbol of equality and justice. It is biblical—what was meant for evil, God used for good.”

Now, in the wake of Lewis’s death, many Democratic legislators have renewed their effort to gain passage of the Voting Rights Advancement Act, passed by the House in 2019. The legislation, which stalled in the Senate, would restore key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. Among other things, the legislation seeks to eliminate partisan systems of gerrymandering, limit efforts to purge voting rolls, and ensure the voting rights of felons no longer incarcerated.

A growing chorus of people now suggest renaming the 2019 voting rights bill after Lewis, who voted for and strongly endorsed the legislation. It would be a fitting tribute. Lewis understood the sanctity of the ballot and spent his life in pursuit of justice and a more perfect union.

“The vote is precious,” Lewis said in June as the U.S. House considered the voting rights legislation, which eventually passed the chamber along strict partisan lines. “It is almost sacred. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy.”

One day soon, John Lewis may have a bridge posthumously named in his honor. It would be well deserved. In the meantime, we benefit by continuing to learn from the life’s work of a civil right giant who himself became a bridge connecting the past to the future. Lewis not only inspired Mandela. He inspired generations of leaders, and undoubtedly will inspire more still to come.

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How the Black Lives Matter generation remembers John Lewis
By AARON MORRISON, Associated Press (07/19/20)

Of all the ways that John Lewis influenced American life and politics, his indelible impact on young people may be among the most enduring. From student activist to elder statesman, Lewis continually encouraged the nation's youth to start “good trouble” — and modeled just how to do that.

In this June 7, 2020 photo provided by the Executive Office of District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser, John Lewis looks over a section of 16th Street that's been renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington. The Washington Monument and the White House are visible in the distance. Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, died. He was 80.

He was arrested alongside millennial activists pushing for comprehensive reform of U.S. immigration laws in 2013. He led a sit-in in the House of Representatives over gun control following a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando in 2016. And when he was not protesting, he was helping young people understand history, as when he cosplayed as his younger self at San Diego’s Comic-Con to celebrate the release of his Selma, Alabama-themed graphic novel series in 2015.

Lewis, the Black civil rights icon who some called the “conscience of Congress,” died Friday.

In one of his last public appearances, he posed for a picture in June, standing on the Black Lives Matter Plaza mural painted just outside of the White House amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.

For the Black Lives Matter generation, the connection to Lewis is deeper than many may realize. As a young man, through clouds of teargas and a hail of billy clubs, Lewis nearly lost his life marching against segregation and for voting rights. As a Georgia congressman, Lewis was generous with his time, taking meetings and sharing stages with activists who, from Sanford, Florida, to Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore to Minneapolis, also withstood teargas — as well as rubber bullets, pepper spray and arrests — in their own protests against racism.

“He didn’t have to stand with us, he chose to," Malkia Devich Cyril, the founder and senior fellow of MediaJustice, which advocates for open and democratic media and technology platforms, told The Associated Press. "That’s real leadership.”

In exclusive interviews with the AP, prominent organizers from the Black Lives Matter movement reflected on Lewis’ example and his kinship with their generation:

BRITTANY PACKNETT CUNNINGHAM, Ferguson activist and educator:

“I remember sitting on the other side of President Obama from (Lewis) at this pretty historic, multigenerational civil rights meeting, and understanding the optical placement of the generations in that moment. And I just kept thinking to myself, do not let John Lewis down. … I was finally able to thank him, face to face, eye to eye, for treading the path my generation was now walking. … With kindness in his eyes and determination in his voice, he reminded me that the road to freedom is never easy — and that’s precisely why we have to keep taking it. ‘You’ll have setbacks,’ he told me. ‘Keep going. Be consistent. You will get there.’”

This Oct 3, 2016 shows Brittany Packnett-Cunningham with U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. Of all the ways that John Lewis influenced American life and politics, his indelible impact on young people may be among the most enduring. “I remember sitting on the other side of President Obama from Lewis at this pretty historic, multigenerational civil rights meeting, and understanding the optical placement of the generations in that moment" said Packnett-Cunningham. 

PHILLIP AGNEW, co-founder of the Dream Defenders, a police and prison abolition group, and organizer in the Movement for Black Lives:

“I think the first time I ever met him was at (Congressional Black Caucus Foundation), the legislative forum that they have every year. This is kind of after Dream Defenders had taken over the Capitol of Florida, and there was a big buzz about our little fledgling group at that time. I didn’t think that he would know who I was — I absolutely knew who he was. … And I remember him coming and speaking to me and saying how proud he was, looking at the things that we had done in Florida.”

PATRISSE CULLORS, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and its global network of chapters:

“The first time I was introduced to Congressman Lewis was through (the 1990 PBS docuseries) ‘Eyes on the Prize.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ He was a young, radical Black man who was challenging not just the status quo in government, but also the older leadership in the movement. And I felt really moved by him. … What I witnessed significantly in ‘Eyes on the Prize’ was police terror and police brutality, and the way that it was used against the (Edmund) Pettus Bridge protesters … who were brutalized fighting for a more equitable America, for Black people in particular. And so, we fast forward to 2020, when we have been in the streets, and the same tactics of the police being used against us as a way to deter us from fighting for Black freedom. And yet, that never deterred Congressman Lewis. ... That is a deeply moving commitment to Black people.”

ALENCIA JOHNSON, political strategist and movement organizer:

“I had the opportunity to staff (former Democratic presidential candidate) Sen. Elizabeth Warren, when we did the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing, the Sunday before Super Tuesday, when I was working on her campaign. And (Lewis) came. It was like he was literally passing the torch to everyone who was there. ... That symbol of him coming from his sick bed, all the way to Selma was just so, wow, I’m actually getting emotional thinking about that. … He was so intentional and persistent about ensuring that people who are fighting know that they have his support and his admiration. He talked about how he admires how young people are showing up now.”

ASH-LEE WOODARD HENDERSON, co-executive director of the Highlander Center for Research and Education, a social justice leadership training school:

“I’ve been thinking about how important John Lewis’ life has been and will continue to be for weeks. And this moment still feels so freaking unfair. ... I remember the stories and encouragement. The never-wavering mandate. … I will remember a man who reminded us all that our optimism isn’t futile. That building a global neighborhood and a building beloved community are similar but not the same. … That’s the legacy. That’s the work. I’m so grateful, in this sea of grief, for such a divine human who loved us so deeply.”

CHARLENE CARRUTHERS, founding national director of BYP100, a Black youth organizing group, and Movement for Black Lives organizer:

“Looking at his work and his story, if I can even do half of that with my life then I’d consider it a worthy contribution. And it’s not about being perfect. But it is about saying, ‘I’m going to be in this for my entire life.’ I’m in this thing. Not for fame, not for glory. He could have done something else. His legacy is one of making a lifetime commitment to Black people.”

CHELSEA FULLER, spokesperson for the Movement for Black Lives and deputy communications director for Blackbird, which supports grassroots movements:

“In 2000, I was 12 years old and, like most children that age, struggling to comprehend the possibilities of who I could become. … He asked me if I liked school and what I wanted to do when I was all grown up. I told him I didn’t know, but that I liked to write and that I liked Black history, but didn’t think there was much I could do outside of being a professor. He took my hand and looked me square in the eye and said that loving my people and being a storyteller were not small things; but that they were powerful. … Congressman John Lewis encouraged me to see the power in stories about our people and our fight for freedom.”

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Morrison is a member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

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John Lewis harnessed his history to become a moral compass for Republicans and Democrats
Paul Kane, Washington Post (07/19/20)

President Barack Obama headed inside the Capitol for the traditional bipartisan luncheon that follows every inauguration when someone handed him a copy of their ticket to the history-making event and asked for his autograph.

Then-President Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, former president George W. Bush, former first lady Laura Bush and Rep. John Lewis lead a walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th anniversary of the marches in Selma, Ala., in 2015.

“It’s because of you, John,” the first black American president wrote to Rep. John Lewis on Jan. 20, 2009.Lewis, who died Friday night after a six-month battle with pancreatic cancer, had that kind of moral clout in a Capitol that increasingly lacks a true compass. The words “civil rights icon” became synonymous with Lewis over his nearly 34 years in Congress, always harking back to his days leading marches in the 1960s as a top lieutenant in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s team.

Lewis harnessed his own history, beaten by state troopers in Selma, Ala., as he and other peaceful protesters tried to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and turned it into a moral calling on Capitol Hill. Every year, he led dozens of members of Congress to a weekend pilgrimage to Selma that served as an educational retreat to learn of the civil rights struggle and culminated with a soul-replenishing trip with Lewis across the bridge where he had nearly died in 1965.

For the 50th anniversary, Lewis marched with then-President Obama on one side of the span while former president George W. Bush marched on the other side.

Five years later, on an early Sunday morning in June, Lewis appeared on 16th Street in Washington just outside the White House. He stood alongside D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who had just ordered the street to be painted with the words “Black Lives Matter.” They inspected the scene where protesters had been dispersed with tear gas to clear Lafayette Square before President Trump could walk to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church to stage a photo opportunity, a scene that was all too familiar in Lewis’s youth. 

Cancer treatments had left him frail, and he required a cane to get around. A few days earlier, he had told his Democratic colleagues that the image of George Floyd’s death in police custody and the ensuing protests hurt him deeply, because he had thought America had moved past such moments.

“It’s been hard and difficult for me. I’ve cried, I’ve prayed,” Lewis told Democrats on the conference call, according to the notes of a participant.

Lewis was not seen in public again, a missing voice for a moment so suited to his life experience.

“John answered brutal violence with courageous hope. And throughout his career as a civil rights leader and public servant, he worked to make our country a more perfect union,” Bush said in a statement Saturday.

The former president never mentioned Trump, but his final sentence made clear he is more comfortable with Lewis’s tactics than the current president’s.

“America can best honor John’s memory by continuing his journey toward liberty and justice for all,” Bush said.

Obama published an essay Saturday that reminisced about their final private talk in early June, after the lawmaker and former president had held a virtual town hall with young activists. Lewis told Obama how inspiring the group was.

“I told him that all those young people — of every race, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — they were his children. They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it,” Obama wrote. 

Through his biography and his own charm, Lewis cast the type of long shadow that every president — until Trump — felt comfortable sitting under.

When Ronald Reagan signed the 1988 law banning housing discrimination, he singled out first-term Rep. Lewis for special praise for bringing “us one step closer to realizing Martin Luther King’s dream.’’

Bill Clinton, appearing in a new documentary about Lewis, essentially apologized for the 1994 crime bill that Lewis opposed because of its strict death penalty provisions.

“The older I’ve gotten, the closer I’ve come to his position. And maybe what we need is a little more reconciliation and rebuilding,” Clinton told the filmmakers of “John Lewis: Good Trouble.”

Bush drew a direct line from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Lyndon B. Johnson signing the first Voting Rights Act in 1965 — a connection he highlighted when he signed a rewrite of the historic law in 2006.

“In a little more than a year after Selma, a newly enfranchised black community used their power at the ballot box to help defeat the sheriff who had sent men with whips and clubs to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on that bloody Sunday,” Bush said then.

In 2011, Obama draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, around Lewis’s neck. 

Despite his reverend-like demeanor, Lewis knew how to play political hardball if it meant advancing his cause.

In 2008, Lewis accused Obama’s opponent, then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), of running a campaign that was creating a racially charged atmosphere that could lead to violence. A decade later, McCain admitted that he was still bitter that someone he considered a “personal hero” had lodged such a charge.

“I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t forgive it. I still can’t,” McCain wrote in “The Restless Wave,” a memoir released three months before his own death from cancer in 2018.

In 1986, Lewis ran against one of his closest friends, Julian Bond, in the Democratic primary for the House seat that Lewis would hold for more than three decades. They had helped run the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, then both settled in Atlanta when they shifted from activism to politics.

Lewis publicly challenged Bond to take a drug test, a racially charged move that Bond believed helped send white voters to Lewis’s side for a narrow victory.

During Obama’s 2008 campaign, Lewis, then in his late 60s, initially rejected Obama and instead endorsed Hillary Clinton, part of a generational divide within the Congressional Black Caucus in which older members doubted that America would elect a young black man president.

For only the second time ever, Lewis drew a primary challenge based on his support of Clinton — and three weeks after Obama defeated her by a more than 2-to-1 margin in Georgia, Lewis switched sides and endorsed the future president. He won his primary that summer with less than 70 percent of the vote.

On Aug. 28, 2008, the night Obama accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, on the 45h anniversary of the March on Washington, which Lewis helped organize, he walked through the Denver stadium trying to find his seat, coming across then-Rep. Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), who had been an early Obama supporter. 

Lewis and the son of the civil rights activist hugged, never saying a word, just weeping, over the history they were about to witness.

“It was a very moving day for him and myself. We didn’t need to speak in a verbal way,” Lewis recalled of that moment in a 2012 interview.

A week before Trump was sworn in, Lewis made clear that he wanted nothing resembling the warm bonds he shared with the first five presidents he served alongside in Congress. He declared Trump not “a legitimate president” because of Russian interference in the 2016 race, and Lewis led a boycott of several dozen Democrats of that inauguration.

Lewis knew when to choose activism and when to use restraint. In 2016, after a massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, some rank-and-file Democrats wanted to stage a sit-in to demand House GOP leaders vote on gun violence bills — so they went to Lewis, whose imprimatur turned the idea into a movement.

But in 2019, once the Democrats had reclaimed the House majority, Lewis joined a group of younger House Democrats who marched to the Senate and sat on the back benches in a silent protest over GOP demands for border security funds.

They planned to erupt in protest and yell “shame on you” at Senate Republicans, a move that Lewis realized would only have antagonized their counterparts.

“That’s not how we do this,” Lewis told the younger Democrats, according to Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who recounted the story for “Good Trouble.”

That documentary, filmed in 2018 and 2019 and released in early July, serves as Lewis’s final words on an extraordinary life.

He grew emotional as he held the official 2009 Obama inaugural program, explaining how he felt when he was declared the winner. 

“Oh, I cried, I cried uncontrollably. I jumped so high and started crying. I didn’t think my feet were going to touch the ground. I cried,” Lewis told the filmmakers.

At Obama’s second inauguration, the president found his older friend and let him know how he felt about him.

“It’s still because of you, John,” Obama told Lewis.

Then Lewis looked in the camera and shared his thought about Trump’s presidency.

“Makes me feel like crying again,” Lewis said.

Obama, Lewis and Bush at the 50th anniversary of the Selma, Ala., marches in 2015.

==================
'Work is still unfinished': Younger civil rights activists vow to continue work of Rep. John Lewis
Nicquel Terry Ellis and Deborah Barfield Berry, USA TODAY (07/19/20)

ATLANTA — As the nation mourns the loss of Rep. John R. Lewis — one of the icons of the Civil Rights Movement — the younger generations he helped groom and inspire are pledging to carry out his legacy. 

Civil rights leaders, young and old, praised Lewis on Saturday for his unwavering fight for social justice, but acknowledged his work — and theirs — is far from finished.

"This death for me puts so much pressure on us," said Philomena Wankenge, 22, a founder of Freedom Fighters DC in Washington, D.C. "He (Lewis) did as much as he could do. He set the battleground, now it's time for us to continue the war."

Wankenge and other young activists, some who have never met Lewis, say his life's work has inspired them to follow in his footsteps. Seasoned civil rights veterans who have worked alongside Lewis feel it's their responsibility to continue his fight for voting rights — particularly with upcoming elections.

Rep. John Lewis (center) talks with Kerry Kennedy (left), daughter of Robert Kennedy, at an event with kids at 16 Park Community Center. The congressman joined Kerry Kennedy and other dignitaries for a day of activities for the remembrance of the Robert Kennedy speech in Indianapolis the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Lewis' death comes as people have taken to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in May in the custody of a white Minneapolis police officer. 

Protests have taken place in more than 1,700 communities across the country calling attention to police brutality against Blacks and systemic racism. Activists are also fighting for quality health care and easier access to the polls.

The protests have drawn parallels to the civil rights movement of the 1960s that Lewis helped organize.

A legacy of 'fighting'

Activists are also mourning the deaths of the era's civil rights legends Rev. C.T. Vivian, who died Friday the same day as Lewis, and Rev. Joseph Lowery, who died in March.

"I'm heartbroken,'' said Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which among other things helps register people to vote.

Campbell said veterans of the civil rights movement, many of whom are in their 80's and 90's, set the bar high for today's activists. Many like Lewis were still active until his health failed. Lewis announced he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer last December. 

“When you think you’re tired you look at some of them and you go, ‘Okay, I’m not tired,” Campbell said. “It’s something about those that came out of that era. It keeps you going.’’ 

“You never stop fighting. And none of them did – until they couldn’t,” she said.

Lewis' death serves as the end of an era —  he was the last surviving member of the "Big Six" civil rights leaders who organized and spoke at the March on Washington for civil and economic rights of Black people. The group included Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.

Fighting for voting rights

Lewis spent most of his life advocating for equality, particularly voting rights for Black people, including as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a young organizer for the March on Washington in 1963. He later served as an Atlanta city councilman and a Democratic member of Congress representing Georgia. He was instrumental in helping get the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed.

Lewis continued to be a champion for voting rights while serving in Congress. He also spoke out against voter suppression and voter purges in Georgia.

LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said Lewis paved the way for her work on voting rights.

Brown first met Lewis during a training program for young activists at the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Alabama in 1995. Lewis was a guest speaker and Brown was helping train activists. 

Lewis, she said, had a humble spirit and often talked about the power of love and forgiveness. 

"He believed that if there were enough people who did good work… that we could really transform the world," Brown said. 

Brown, who has worked across the South, including in Georgia, said she is lobbying for the restoration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. Brown said she wants the law to mandate more federal oversight over elections and same-day voter registration.

 Vice President Biden, center, leads a group across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on March 3, 2013. From left: Selma Mayor George Evans, Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Biden, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.

“I’m hoping in this moment that in the celebration of his life that we don’t minimize the fact that the work is still unfinished," she said. "Until every single citizen has free and fair access to the ballot, democracy has not been achieved." 

Brown's group led get-out-the-vote efforts in 2017 helping Democrat Doug Jones become the first Democrat in 25 years to win a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. He was favored by 98 percent of black women voters.

Lewis, who campaigned for Jones, told USA TODAY he cried the night Jones won.

 "It says something about what could happen,'' Lewis said. "And his election should give other people hope.”

John Lewis' 'disciples'

Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, the first black congresswoman from Alabama, has introduced voting rights measures that Lewis has touted, including her 2019 Voting Rights Advancement Act. When the House passed it last December, Lewis banged the gavel.

Sewell calls herself a "disciple'' of Lewis and said he was a mentor. The two were often at press conferences and other events calling for more voting rights protections. Lewis had worked in Alabama during the civil rights movement trying to register Blacks to vote.

Sewell said she learned much about determination and the drive to continue fighting from Lewis.

“There’s a lot of work to be done. But the good news is John gave us a roadmap,’’ she said. “He may not get there with us, but we are better because of his vision, because of his leadership and because he led by example.”

Younger civil rights activists say they were also inspired by Lewis. 

Wankenge said his speeches resonated with her because he spoke with authority and demanded the room. 

"His voice was his power," she said. “I see myself in him."  

Campbell called the current civil rights movement multi-generational and noted similar fights in the past for voting rights and civil rights.

“The movement never stops. You do your part in it,’’ she said. “We support the generation coming behind. That’s how they did it.”

Melanie Campbell, (center) president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, talked to a group of black women March 5, 2020 in front of the U.S. Capitol. The women were attending a conference focused on issues including the Census, voting rights and health care.

Derrick Johnson, president of the national NAACP, said Lewis laid the groundwork for him and other civil rights activists and they have more work to do. 

"As a result of his integrity and his moral compass, he dedicated his life and set an example for all of us to follow,’’ said Johnson.

Johnson once led the state chapter of the NAACP in Mississippi where Lewis and others worked to register Blacks to vote in the 1960s.

Johnson said the NAACP is continuing the push for voting rights and has ramped up its national get-out-the-vote efforts for the November elections.

“The steps he made set an example for many generations that will come behind,'' Johnson said of Lewis.

Johnson and other civil rights leaders said they're excited about the younger generation stepping up.

Derrick Johnson, president of the national NAACP, in the blue cap, listens as Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., addresses the the crowd March 1, 2020 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama.

Damayanti Wallace, a member of the Chicago-based GoodKids MadCity, an anti-gun violence group for youth, said through Lewis' life she learned that it's possible to be both an activist and a politician. Wallace, 19, said the next step for her generation is to continue leading marches, petitions and workshops.

“The next step is to keep fighting," Wallace said. "That’s our best bet and the only way to get what we want. The end goal is defunding police and dismantling the system."

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, said Lewis had the "clearest vision of justice there can be." 

"What happens from here is that we keep fighting," Robinson said. "We keep strategizing, we keep working to win justice and freedom." 

Contributing: Grace Hauck

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Work is still unfinished': Younger civil rights activists vow to continue work of Rep. John Lewis