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Representative John Lewis (D-Georgia), a stalwart of the civil rights movement, passed away last Friday, 17 July, following a months-long battle with pancreatic cancer. Lewis had spent his entire life, first as an activist and later on as a politician, fighting against racism, and had inspired generations of Americans to adopt his nonviolent yet uncompromising and urgent demand for racial justice and equality.
Born in Georgia in 1940, Lewis was raised on a cotton farm, and had grown up amidst the brutal racism and segregation of the Jim Crow era. As a teenager, Lewis had been deeply inspired by the sermons and speeches of reverend Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio. Despite his family’s objection, Lewis chose to take part in the swelling civil rights movement during the late 1950’s. “The action of Rosa Parks and the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble,” Lewis said in 2015.
It was during his studies at Fisk University in Tennessee when Lewis had joined the vanguard of the civil rights movement. He was mentored by prominent activist figures, such as Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who promoted the teachings of Gandhi and held workshops on nonviolent civil disobedience. Lewis had joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and took part in carrying out sit-ins and other forms of peaceful resistance against Jim Crow laws and systemic racism. The anti-racist activists stood their ground despite being brutally beaten up by white segregationists and facing recurring arrests.
In 1961, Lewis was among the 13 original Freedom Riders - a group of young activists who took bus trips from the North to the South to protest segregation in public transportation. “If there was anything I learned on that long, bloody bus trip of 1961, it was this — that we were in for a long, bloody fight here in the American South. And I intended to stay in the middle of it,” Lewis wrote in his memoir, reflecting the Freedom Riders trip during which he and other activists were ruthlessly beaten up in several cities and had been arrested on multiple occasions.
In 1963, Lewis helped organise and spoke at the monumental march on Washington. Later on, in 1965, he was among the leaders of the Edmund Pettus Bridge march in Selma, Alabama, where 600 people protested against voting rights suppression of African Americans in the South. The march in Selma, often dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” was met with brutal force of state troopers, and footage of Lewis and his fellow peaceful protesters being clubbed with barb-wired tubes and being hailed with tear-gas was televised across America.
These images had spurred a wave of outrage across the nation, and propelled the passage of the Voting Rights Act in August of the same year. The Act ushered in a new era of black participation and representation in American politics, and outlawed the South’s discriminatory and racist voting practices espoused in the wake of the Civil War.
Lewis became a Congress member in 1987 and has been known as the “conscience of Congress” due to his unrelenting pursuit of justice. His spirit of activism had guided Lewis throughout his political career, and he went on protesting against injustices and had been arrested on multiple occasions. He also staged sit-ins in Congress, most recently in 2016 following the Orlando nightclub massacre - when Lewis and several of his colleagues demanded that Congress vote to pass stricter gun control restrictions.
Lewis had also been supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement that gained steam following George Floyd's killing, which affected him deeply. “It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets, to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call ‘good trouble’,” he said in an interview for “CBS This Morning”. “It is so much more massive and all inclusive [...] There will be no turning back.”
Lewis embodied a rare combination of fearless anti-racist sentiments and an uncompromising longing for justice and peace. His legacy will not only be that of a titan of the civil rights movement, but also of a uniquely compassionate figure in American history who advocated for freedom and equality across the board. As we continue to battle systemic injustices and fight to remedy the deep-rooted stains of racism, we should heed Lewis’ call for unrelenting determination throughout the “very, very long road toward freedom, justice for all humankind.”
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