John Lewis

John Robert Lewis was an American civil rights activist and statesman, born near Troy, Alabama, on February 21, 1940, and raised in rural Pike County as the third of ten children. His parents, Willie Mae and Eddie Lewis, were sharecroppers, and his great-grandfather, Frank Carter, had been born enslaved in the same county in 1862. Lewis grew up poor, in a home with few books, and attended a small Rosenwald School supported by the community. A teacher urged him to read, and he tried to read everything he could.

Segregation shaped Lewis early. As a child, he had little interaction with white people, and by the time he was six he had seen only two white people in his life. Trips into Troy exposed him to racism and segregation, including the public library where, at 16, he and members of his family were told the library was for whites only and not for colored people. An uncle’s trip with him to Buffalo, New York, when Lewis was 11 made the contrast with Troy’s segregation clear, because he learned that schools, buses, and businesses in the North were integrated.

Lewis first heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio in 1955 and closely followed the Montgomery bus boycott. At 15 he preached his first public sermon, at 17 he met Rosa Parks, and at 18 he met King. Lewis aspired to be a preacher from childhood, even preaching to his family’s chickens at age five, and later credited evangelist Billy Graham, a friend of King’s, with helping change him and inspiring his desire to become a minister. After being denied admission to Troy University, he wrote to King and was invited to meet him. King called him “the boy from Troy” and discussed a lawsuit, but Lewis chose, after speaking with his parents, to continue his education at a small historically Black college in Tennessee.

In Nashville, Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary and was ordained as a Baptist minister. He later earned a bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University. As a student, he joined the civil rights movement, organizing sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and taking part in the Nashville Student Movement. He was arrested and jailed many times during nonviolent efforts to desegregate downtown businesses. Workshops led by the Rev. James Lawson and the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith deepened his commitment to the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, which he practiced for the rest of his life.

Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders in 1961, challenging segregated seating on interstate buses through the South. He later chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from 1963 to 1966 and was one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups that organized the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965 he led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers and police attacked Lewis and other marchers in the event known as Bloody Sunday. These actions made him one of the central figures in the movement to end legalized racial segregation in the United States.

A Democrat, Lewis was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1986 and represented Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death on July 17, 2020. The district included most of Atlanta. Over 17 terms, he became dean of the Georgia congressional delegation and served as a chief deputy whip from 1991, then as a senior chief deputy whip from 2003. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. His call, “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?” still carries the force of a life spent turning belief into action.