“It is with inconsolable pain and abiding sadness that we announce the passing of US Representative John Lewis,” his family said in a statement. “He was honored and respected as the conscience of the United States Congress and an icon of United States history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother. He was an unconditional champion in the ongoing struggle to demand respect for dignity and the worth of every human being. He dedicated his entire life to nonviolent activism and was an outspoken advocate in the fight for equal justice in the United States. He will be deeply missed. “
It’s another heartbreak in a year filled with them as the United States mourns the deaths of nearly 140,000 Covid-19 Americans and struggles to control the virus.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced her death in a statement.
“Today, the United States mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes in United States history: Congressman John Lewis, the conscience of Congress,” said the California Democrat.
Lewis had promised to fight the disease after announcing in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which was discovered as a result of a routine medical visit and subsequent tests.
“I have been in some kind of fight, for freedom, equality, basic human rights, for most of my life. I have never faced a fight like the one I have now,” he said in a statement at the time. .
Lewis, a Democrat who served as the representative of the United States in Georgia’s 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, was widely viewed as a moral conscience of Congress due to his incarnation of nonviolent civil rights struggle for decades. . His passionate oratory was backed by a long history of action that included, by his count, more than 40 arrests as he spoke out against racial and social injustice.
A follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., participated in sit-ins at the lunch counter, joined the Freedom Riders on challenging segregated buses, and, at the age of 23, was a keynote speaker at the historic 1963 March in Washington.
“But I felt that when we were sitting on those stools at the lunch bar, or going to the Freedom Ride, or marching from Selma to Montgomery, there was a power and a force. Almighty God was there with us.”
Lewis has said that King inspired his activism. Angered by the injustice of the Jim Crow South, he launched what he called “good trouble” with organized protests and sit-ins. In the early 1960s, he was a freedom rider, challenging segregation at interstate bus terminals in the south and in the nation’s capital.
“We don’t want our freedom to be gradual; we want to be free now,” he said at the time.
At age 25, Lewis helped lead a voting rights march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other protesters were greeted by heavily armed state and local police officers who attacked them with sticks, fracturing Lewis’s skull. The images of that “Bloody Sunday” shocked the nation and spurred support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Despite the attack and other beatings, Lewis never lost his activist spirit, taking him from protests to politics. He was elected to the Atlanta city council in 1981, and then to Congress six years later.
Once in Washington, he focused on fighting poverty and helping younger generations by improving education and health care. She also co-wrote a series of graphic novels about the civil rights movement, which earned her a National Book Award.
Born on a cotton farm in Troy, Alabama, in a segregated America on February 21, 1940, Lewis lived to see an African-American president-elect, a moment he said he never thought would come despite his decades of struggle for equality.
He described attending the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 as an “out-of-body” experience.
In 2011, after more than 50 years on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Lewis received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, placed on his neck by the first black president of the United States.
“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and blood to fulfill his promise. And over the decades, he not only gave himself up for the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired the generations that followed. to try to live up to their example, “Obama said.
Before Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Lewis said he did not consider him a “legitimate” president, an astonishing rebuke from a sitting member of Congress toward an incoming president.
“I think the Russians were involved in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” said Lewis.
Trump responded, calling Lewis “all talk” and “no action” and saying he should focus more on “fixing and helping” his district rather than “complaining” about Russia.
“I said to the students, ‘When you see something that is not right, it is not fair, not only, you have a moral obligation to do something, to say something,'” Lewis said in the spring of 2018. “And Dr. King inspired us to do just that. “
Lewis also believed in forgiveness.
He once described an incident when, as a young man, he was beaten with blood by members of the Ku Klux Klan after trying to enter a “white waiting room.”
“Many years later, in February ’09, one of the men who had beaten us came to my Capitol Hill office, I was about 70 years old, his son was about 40, and he said: ‘Mr. Lewis, I am one of the People who beat you and your seatmate “on a bus,” Lewis said, adding that the man said he had been to the KKK. “He said, ‘I want to apologize. Will you accept my apology? ‘”
After accepting their apologies and hugging the father and son, the three of them cried together, Lewis recalled.
“It is power on the path of peace, the path of love,” Lewis said. “We should never, never hate. The way of love is a better way.”
This story has been updated with additional developments on Saturday.
Jim Acosta and Haley Byrd of CNN contributed to this report.
.
