- He was known by his colleagues as the conscience of Congress,
and on Friday, representative John
Lewis died at the age of 80 after a battle
with pancreatic cancer.
An Alabama sharecropper's son, Lewis was a hero of the 1960s
Civil Rights Movement, endured beatings by white police
and mobs, and played an outsized role in American politics
for 60 years.
A protege of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.,
Lewis led sit-ins to integrate all-white lunch counters,
was one of the original Freedom Riders who integrated buses,
and suffered a skull fracture in a savage beating
while demonstrating for black voting rights on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma during an incident
now called Bloody Sunday.
50 years later, he walked arm in arm
with the nation's first Black president
across that same bridge.
JOHN LEWIS: I'm John Lewis.
I'm running for Congress.
- Lewis was elected in 1986 as a democrat to the US House
of Representatives from Georgia and kept up the fight
for civil rights and human rights
until the end of his life, inspiring others
with calls to make, quote, good trouble.
JOHN LEWIS: Speak up!
Speak out!
Get in the way.
Get in good trouble.
- Good trouble!
JOHN LEWIS: Necessary trouble, and help
redeem the soul of America.
- In 2016, Lewis used nonviolent protest tactics he learned from
King to organize a 24-hour sit-in
on the House floor to push for gun control legislation.
And he continued to fight for voting
rights throughout his career.
JOHN LEWIS: The vote is an opportunity to be
on the right side of history.
- Tributes from leaders in both parties
poured in late Friday and Saturday.
In a statement, former President Barack Obama
said that Lewis, quote, loved his country so much that he
risked his life and his blood so that it might live up
to its promise, and through the decades,
he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom
and justice, but inspired generations
that followed to try to live up to his example.