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| John Lewis |
Yesterday, we received sad news about the death of John Robert Lewis, the American civil rights leader and politician, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and one of the Big Six leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington.
The Grandma wants to pay homage to John Lewis, a symbol of the black struggle in a favour of Civil and Human Rights and against racism and segregation. She considers the best way to pay homage to John Lewis is talking about his life, his activism and his political career.
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940-July 17, 2020) was an American civil rights leader and politician.
He was a member of the Democratic Party, and was the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death. He was also the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. The district he served includes the northern three-quarters of Atlanta.
Lewis, who as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the Big Six leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington, played many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States.
He became a leader of the Democratic Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving from 1991 as a Chief Deputy Whip and from 2003 as Senior Chief Deputy Whip. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
More information: John Lewis
John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama.
As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people; by the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. As he grew older he began taking trips into town with his family, where he experienced racism and segregation, such as at the public library in Troy.
Lewis had relatives who lived in northern cities, and he learned from them that the North had integrated schools, buses, and businesses. When Lewis was 11, an uncle took him on a trip to Buffalo, New York, making him more acutely aware of Troy's segregation.
In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio, and he closely followed King's Montgomery bus boycott later that year. Lewis met Rosa Parks when he was 17, and met King for the first time when he was 18.
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| John Lewis with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1960) |
Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and then received a bachelor's degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University. As a student, he was dedicated to the civil rights movement.
He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and took part in many other civil rights activities as part of the Nashville Student Movement. The Nashville sit-in movement was responsible for the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville.
Lewis was arrested and jailed many times in the nonviolent movement to desegregate the downtown area of the city. He was also instrumental in organizing bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality.
While a student, Lewis was invited to attend nonviolence workshops held at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church by the Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith. There, Lewis and other students became dedicated adherents to the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, which he practiced for the rest of his life.
In 1961, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. There were seven whites and six blacks who were determined to ride from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans in an integrated fashion. At that time, several southern states continued to enforce laws prohibiting black and white riders from sitting next to each other on public transportation.
More information: My Black History
The Freedom Ride, originated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and revived by James Farmer and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960) that declared segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional.
The Freedom Rides also exposed the passivity of the government regarding violence against citizens of the country who were simply acting in accordance with the law. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. The Kennedy Administration then called for a cooling-off period, with a moratorium on Freedom Rides.
In 1963, when Charles McDew stepped down as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis, one of the founding members of SNCC, was elected to take over.
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| John Lewis & The March on Washington (1963) |
In 1963, as chairman of SNCC Lewis was named one of the Big Six leaders who were organizing the March on Washington, the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King's celebrated I Have a Dream speech, along with Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins; Lewis was the youngest of the Big Six.
In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts for Mississippi Freedom Summer, a campaign to register black voters across the South and expose college students from around the country to the perils of African-American life in the South. Lewis traveled the country encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people in Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the union, to register and vote.
In 1966, Lewis moved to New York City to take a job as the associate director of the Field Foundation. He was there a little over a year before moving back to Atlanta to direct the Southern Regional Council's Community Organization Project. During his time with the SRC, he completed his degree from Fisk University.
In 1970, Lewis became the director of the Voter Education Project (VEP), a position he held until 1977.
More information: The Indian Express
In 1981, Lewis ran for an at-large seat on the Atlanta City Council. He won with 69% of the vote, and served on the council until 1986.
After nine years as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Fowler gave up the seat to make a successful run for the U.S. Senate.
Lewis represented Georgia's 5th congressional district, one of the most consistently Democratic districts in the nation. Since its formalization in 1845, the district has been represented by a Democrat for all but the nine years the seat was vacant when Georgia seceded during the Civil War.
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| John Lewis Mural, Atlanta (2020) |
Lewis opposed the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2000 U.S. trade agreement with China that passed the House. He opposed the Clinton administration on NAFTA and welfare reform.
Lewis drew on his historical involvement in the Civil Rights Movement as part of his politics.
He made an annual pilgrimage to Alabama to retrace the route he marched in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery -a route Lewis worked to make part of the Historic National Trails program.
In March 2003, Lewis spoke to a crowd of 30,000 in Oregon during an anti-war protest before the start of the Iraq War. He was arrested in 2006 and 2009 and outside the Sudan embassy in protest against the genocide in Darfur.
He was one of eight U.S. Representatives, from six states, arrested while holding a sit-in near the west side of the U.S. Capitol building, to advocate for immigration reform. Lewis also led the 2016 House Democrats sit-in demanding that the House take action on gun control in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting and the failure of the United States Senate to act.
More information: ABC News
In 2013, Lewis became the first member of Congress to write a graphic novel, with the launch of a trilogy titled March. The March trilogy is a black and white comics trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement, told through the perspective of civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis. The first volume, March: Book One is written by Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illustrated and lettered by Nate Powell and was published in August 2013, the second volume, March: Book Two was published in January 2015 and the final volume, March: Book Three was published in August 2016.
In an August 2014 interview, Lewis cited the influence of a 1958 comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, on his decision to adapt his experience to the graphic novel format. March: Book One became a number one New York Times bestseller for graphic novels and spent more than a year on the lists.
On July 17, 2020, Lewis died at the age of 80 in Atlanta, Georgia.
More information: Vox
When you see something that is not right,
not fair, not just, you have to speak up.
You have to say something; you have to do something.
John Lewis
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