Civil Rights Leader Representative John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, was “an American icon decades before his election to the House in 1986,” Fox News Congress correspondent Chad Pergram said Saturday.
In an interview on “Cavuto LIVE”, Pergram recalled a passionate life of gigantic achievement.
JOHN LEWIS, ICON OF CIVIL RIGHTS, CONGRESS FOR 33 YEARS, DEAD AT 80
“He was the youngest speaker alongside Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial during the march in Washington in August 1963. Lewis also led several protests in the south, sitting in restaurants and pharmacies, protesting segregated lunch counters,” he recalled.
FILE – In this July 2, 1963, file photo, six leaders of the nation’s largest black civil rights organizations pose at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. From left to right: John Lewis, chair of the Student Nonviolence Coordination Committee; Whitney Young, National Director, Urban League; A. Philip Randolph, president of the Black American Labor Council; Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; James Farmer, director of the Racial Equality Congress; and Roy Wilkins, executive secretary, National Association for the Advancement of People of Color. Lewis, who led the fight against racial discrimination from the southern battlefields of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died on Friday, July 17, 2020. (AP Photo / Harry Harris, file)
Lewis, 80, died Friday night after turning 33 in Congress. Doctors diagnosed Lewis with pancreatic cancer late last year.
He was just 23 years old when he joined King and other speakers outside the Lincoln Memorial. According to The Washington Post, Lewis was the last surviving speaker at the event.
“President Barack Obama talked about how he met John Lewis as a law school student and hugged Lewis at his 2009 inauguration,” said Pergram. “The former president said he told Lewis that he would never have become president without the sacrifices he made. Although, interestingly, Lewis initially supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the presidency in 2008. That was a great dismay to members of the Black Caucus of Congress “. “
“On Bloody Sunday, Selma’s march to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965, helped shape Lewis’s legacy,” he continued. “As Lewis led protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state police officers beat the future congressman so badly that they broke his skull and doctors then had to insert a steel plate into Lewis’s head that led to his grave. “
“Lewis then took lawmakers on an annual pilgrimage across the bridge to commemorate Bloody Sunday,” said host Neil Cavuto.
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“And, decades after those nonviolent sit-ins at lunch, Lewis was still deploying those same tactics practiced years before,” Pergram said. “After the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and Florida [in] 2016, Lewis conducted a sit-down sitting on the carpet on the floor inside the House chamber to protest gun violence. That lasted more than 24 hours, Neil. “
“Fox is told that it is possible that Lewis may be in state at the Capitol Rotunda,” he concluded.
Dom Calicchio, Chad Pergram and The Associated Press of Fox News contributed to this report.
