John Lewis

John Robert Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, near Troy in Pike County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis. He came of age in the rural, segregated South, and as a young man he answered the call of the movement, taking his theological training at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, before earning a degree in religion and philosophy at Fisk University.

In Nashville he embraced the discipline of nonviolence, joining the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins and, in 1961, riding as one of the original Freedom Riders who challenged segregation on interstate travel at grave personal cost. From 1963 to 1966 he served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and at only twenty-three he became the youngest of the "Big Six" leaders and a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington.

On March 7, 1965, Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where state troopers beat the peaceful column on the day remembered as Bloody Sunday. His fractured skull and unbroken resolve helped move a nation toward the Voting Rights Act, and he carried the moral authority of that day for the rest of his life.

In 1986 the people of Georgia's Fifth District sent him to the United States House of Representatives, where he served for more than three decades until his death on July 17, 2020, honored as the conscience of the Congress. He taught that the vote is precious and that trouble, when it is good and necessary, is holy. May his courage light the way for every generation that follows.