Rep John Lewis died at age 80.

Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights leader who served in the House of Representatives for more than 30 years and was called “the conscience of Congress,” died Friday at the age of 80.

The lawmaker, who began his civil rights fight at age 18 during a sit-in at the lunch counter in Nashville, Tennessee, announced that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer in December 2019.

At the time, he vowed not to let the diagnosis stop him and said: “I have been in some kind of fight, for freedom, equality, basic human rights, for most of my life. I’ve never faced a fight like the one I have right now. “

And he didn’t stop, from making passionate arguments for the impeachment of President Donald Trump from the floor of the House of Representatives, to taking part in the protests against racism and police brutality that have swept the world, visiting the black lives of Washington. DC Matter Plaza, and encouraging protesters around the world to “stand up, talk, talk, do what I call getting into ‘trouble’.”

Lewis dedicated his life to improving America through “good trouble”

Getting into good trouble defined Lewis’s life.

Born into a strict sharecropper segregation system near Troy, Alabama, in 1940, his parents taught Lewis to avoid interactions with the police and, as he told the Southern Oral History Program, “you just don’t play mess with the law “.

And Lewis’s family often told him there was nothing to be done about the racial injustice that permeated every facet of American life in his youth, that it was something he had to live with.

As Lewis said at the opening ceremony of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, “I would ask my mother, my father, my grandparents and great-grandparents,” Why segregation? Why racial discrimination? And they said: “This is how it is. Don’t get in trouble. Don’t get in the way.

But Lewis came to believe that getting into trouble wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: messing with “the law” was a powerful means of bringing about change.

While studying at the Nashville American Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1950s, Lewis began learning about nonviolent organization. And in November 1959, he participated in his first sit-down, an attempt to force Nashville lunch counters to integrate.

Those Nashville sit-ins continued in 1960, and intensified after the Greensboro sit-ins in February 1960; Lewis described being beaten when he and his companions sat in silence, and was eventually arrested, angering his family.

It wasn’t his last arrest (he and his fellow activists eventually managed to desegregate the Nashville lunch counters) and Lewis moved on to other battles across the United States, doing a job that led to more than 40 arrests.

Rick Diamond / Getty Images

The arrests did not stop him or beat him. bloody, burned and left with broken bones. Instead, Lewis was everywhere they needed him, volunteering to be one of the original Freedom Riders, the activists who organized mobile protests on segregated buses across interstate lines; risking his life to use restrooms and parks and lunch counters reserved for whites; and traveling south to register black voters.

During the 1960s, Lewis helped create, then chaired the Nonviolent Coordination Committee for Students (SNCC) and was one of the organizers of the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington.

There, he delivered a fiery speech, telling the nation: “We will chip the South segregated into a thousand pieces and bring them together in the image of God and democracy. We should say: ‘Wake up, America. Awake!’ Because we cannot stop, and we will not and will not be patient. ”

Lewis was convinced to tone down the speech, removing direct criticism of the Kennedy administration’s civil rights flaws and a promise that black Americans would “march south, through Dixie’s heart, like Sherman.”

Although those words were removed, Lewis kept that promise, perhaps nowhere more than in Selma, Alabama, when he led a group of protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. The protesters had gathered for a march to Montgomery, Alabama, to demand voting rights. They were detained on the bridge by about 150 members of the police, who ordered them to end their efforts.

The protesters did not. One minute after the order was issued, Lewis and the other protesters were attacked with tear gas, whips, sticks, and barbed wire.

More than 50 people were injured. Lewis suffered a skull fracture and was beaten while trying to orient himself and stand up.

He testified about the day, now known as Bloody Sunday, a week later. Images of the beatings, including a photograph of Lewis being hit on the head by an officer, were seen around the world; His video was broadcast on television. And public pressure created by brutality prompted the federal government to enact the Voting Rights Act, a measure that empowered black voters and helped bring Lewis to the government.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

After Stokely Carmichael replaced him at SNCC, who advocated a more conflicting approach to civil rights organizing, Lewis focused on executing the text of the Voting Rights Act, focusing on registering minorities to vote before be called by former President Jimmy Carter to lead a federal volunteer agency.

It was these roles that led him to politics, beginning with the city council in Atlanta, and then toward the United States House of Representatives, where he set about bringing “good trouble” to Washington.

Lewis was the consciousness of Congress

Lewis was considered the moral center of Congress.

In recent years, he was seen as an elderly statesman who tried to hold his colleagues accountable for issues such as armed violence (for example, he led a sitting in Congress calling for arms reform in 2016) and even impeachment. He told lawmakers in a stimulating speech Last fall, although it had been slow to support an impeachment investigation, the time had come to launch one, arguing that “delaying or doing otherwise would betray the foundations of our democracy.”

Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call / Getty Images

Lewis’s colleagues praised this activism as a testament to his character; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote Saturday that the legislator was “a titan of the civil rights movement whose kindness, faith, and courage transformed our nation.”

And former President Barack Obama described Lewis as a man who had “a tremendous impact on the history of this country” who served “as a beacon on that long journey to a more perfect union.”

“I first met John when I was in law school and told him he was one of my heroes,” wrote Obama. Years later, when I was elected to the United States Senator, I told him I was on his shoulders. When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him to the inauguration post before he was sworn in and told him he was only there because of the sacrifices he made. “

Lewis continued to make those sacrifices until his death, working to connect the activism of his youth to the problems of the present. He has led annual Bloody Sunday celebrations, taking advantage of those occasions to remind fellow lawmakers, and Americans in general, that the fight for voting rights is not over. In fact, with the Supreme Court’s partial denial of the Voting Rights Act and measures such as the recent court ruling allowing poll taxes in Florida, the testimony Lewis gave in 1971 to the House Judiciary Committee on Black voters is still relevant.

“We cannot be fooled into believing that, in these so-called new and changing times, the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary,” Lewis said then. “The numbers of unregistered black voters indicate that there is still a need for active enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, active enforcement that we have not seen for some time.”

Even in his last days, Lewis did not give up his defense. He spent his final weeks visiting the anti-racism protest site in Washington, DC, and connecting with a new generation of activists.

“It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from across the United States and around the world take to the streets: talking, talking and getting into what I call ‘trouble,'” Lewis said. Gayle King in CBS this morning in June. “There will be no going back.”

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