Civil Rights Titan, Georgia Congressman John Lewis Dead At Age 80

ATLANTA, GA — Longtime Georgia Congressman John Lewis, the son of sharecroppers who became one of the “Big Six” leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement and spent his life fighting for racial integration, died Friday, seven months after he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Widely regarded on Capitol Hill as the moral compass of the Democratic Party caucus, the dean of Georgia’s congressional delegation was 80 years old.

The Lewis family confirmed his death in a statement, writing:

"It is with inconsolable grief and enduring sadness that we announce the passing of U.S. Rep. John Lewis. He was honored and respected as the conscience of the US Congress and an icon of American history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother. He was a stalwart champion in the on-going struggle to demand respect for the dignity and worth of every human being. He dedicated his entire life to non-violent activism and was an outspoken advocate in the struggle for equal justice in America. He will be deeply missed."

Lewis’s death marks the passing of the mantle of the civil rights movement from a generation that defeated the discriminatory and segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era in America’s Deep South to a new one to carry on what he called the “good trouble, necessary trouble” to bring about social change. One of the architects of the watershed 1963 March on Washington, Lewis was the sole surviving keynote speaker at the massive protest where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have A Dream” speech.

Lewis, 23 at the time and the youngest of the rally’s keynote speakers, was more urgent.

“We want our freedom,” he told the crowd of 250,000 gathered on the National Mall on Aug.28, 1963, in the campaign against racial apartheid in America, “and we want it now.”

Tributes: A Lion For Civil Rights

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Lewis "was a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation — from the determination with which he met discrimination at lunch counters and on Freedom Rides, to the courage he showed as a young man facing down violence and death on Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years."

RELATED: John Lewis Remembered As A Gentle Soul Who Fought Racism

Former President Barack Obama issued a lengthy statement on Lewis's death, writing that few people were as privileged as Lewis"to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way."

"And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders — to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise."

As news of Lewis's death spread, tributes — and an outpouring of grief — flooded Twitter. A common theme was that his civility made the world a better place, that he inspired others to fight for justice and that he was a symbol of hope, forgiveness and love.

"I simply have no words to express the magnitude of this loss," Sherillyn Ifill, the president and director of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund wrote. "This is just too much. Rest in peace and power."

Lewis "altered the course of history and left America a better place," Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus wrote, calling Lewis a "legendary leader, civil rights icon and change agent extraordinaire."

"John Lewis was gentle and strong and kind," wrote Michigan Libertarian Congressman Justin Amash, who left the Republican Party last year. "His message was justice, and his voice was powerful. May his memory be eternal."

Former Georgia state legislator Stacey Abrams called him a "defender of justice" and "champion of right."

"Our conscience, he was a griot of this modern age, one who saw its hatred but fought ever towards the light. And never once did he begrudge sharing its beauty," Abrams wrote. "I loved him & will miss him.

Massachussetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren called him a "true American hero and the moral compass of our nation."

"May his courage and conviction live on in all of us as we continue to make good trouble for justice and opportunity," she wrote .

Former President Bill Clinton called Lewis "the conscience of America."

"John Lewis gave all he had to redeem America’s unmet promise of equality and justice for all, and to create a place for us to build a more perfect union together," Clinton wrote.

"Werent' we blessed to have him among us?" The Martin Luther King Jr. Center said.

An Inconceivable Journey

Lewis’s passion for civil rights had been ignited by, of all things, a comic book set against the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that followed Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.

“I remember back in the 1960s — late ’50s, really — reading a comic book called ‘Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.’ Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend nonviolence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King Jr., to study civil disobedience,” he once said.

That “black people would openly defy white people in the state of Alabama” was inconceivable at the time, Lewis told The New York Times in 1976. “To see hundreds of thousands of Montgomery blacks refusing to ride the buses, walking together to work, and forming car pools was a moving experience. We used to lie in the dark at night listening to the news on the radio.”

Lewis announced in December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

“I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said in a statement at the time. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”

As a young man, he traveled by bus throughout the South with the Freedom Riders, fighting with other African Americans for the right to use what were whites-only lunch counters, restrooms and waiting rooms. Lewis was arrested more than 40 times from 1960 to 1966, and he once spent 31 days in the Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi.

He was savagely beaten, nearly to death on several occasions. He was left unconscious in a pool of blood outside a Greyhound bus terminal in Montgomery, Alabama, after he and about 100 other protesters tried to desegregate a bus. His skull was fractured in the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a protest he helped organize that encapsulated the momentous changes taking place in America.

“Sometimes you have to not just dream about what could be — you get out and push and you pull and you preach,” Lewis once said. “And you create a climate and environment to get those in high places, to get men and women of goodwill in power, to act.”

A Vanguard For Change

The third in a family of 10 children, Lewis was born to Eddie and Willie Mae Carter Lewis on Feb. 21, 1940, and raised on a 100-acre cotton farm near Troy, Alabama, that his sharecropper father bought with his life savings of $300. The deep tentacles of segregation reached far into Alabama culture. By the time he was 6, Lewis had seen only two white people. He attended country schools with other black children and graduated from a segregated high school.

He left Alabama to attend American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, after the nearly all-white Troy State College, now Troy University, denied his application. Lewis discussed the matter with the civil rights establishment in Montgomery, but he decided against a challenge that could imperil his life and his parents’ economic livelihood. He graduated from American Baptist in 1961 and received a second bachelor of arts degree from Fisk University in 1967.

Lewis chose to serve his faith not through the traditional church channel but rather as a vanguard of social change. Though physical beatings left him with two concussions and nearly lifelong pain, Lewis remained committed to the Gandhian-based, nonviolent social action as his philosophy for life.

Lewis rose through the ranks of the 1960s-era activist group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other groups, eventually becoming the director of the Voter Education Project, which — with a full-time staff of 10 — added nearly 4 million minorities to America’s voter rolls throughout the Deep South.

He served in that role for seven years, until President Jimmy Carter appointed him to lead ACTION, a federal agency that oversaw domestic volunteer programs. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981 and five years later was elected to his first term to Congress from an Atlanta district. He has been re-elected every two years ever since.

Lewis has applied the lessons of civil rights era to current civil rights struggles.

He brought back his 1960s-style activism after the Pulse nightclub massacre 2016, joining hands with his Democratic colleagues as they sang “We Shall Overcome” during a 25-hour House of Representatives sit-in to demand a vote on gun control measures.

“We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time,” he said in one of the impassioned floor speeches for which he was known.

“How many more mothers? How many more fathers need to shed tears of grief before we do something? Give us a vote. Let us vote. We came here to do our job. We came here to work.”

Throughout his lifetime, Lewis has fought for health care reform, equality and better schools, and against poverty and oppression at every turn. He oversaw multiple renewals of the Voting Rights Act, and he decried the Supreme Court decision that struck down part of the law as a “dagger into the heart” of voting rights.

The civil rights icon was recognized with more than 50 honorary degrees and numerous awards, from the sole John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage Award” for Lifetime Achievement, to the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Barack Obama in 2011.

“ ‘If not us, then who? If not now, then when?’ ” Obama said at the time. “It’s a question John Lewis has been asking his entire life. It’s what led him back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma after he had already been beaten within an inch of his life days before. It’s why, time and again, he faced down death so that all of us could share equally in the joys of life.

“It’s why, all these years later, he is known as the Conscience of the United States Congress, still speaking his mind on issues of justice and equality. And generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.”

That an African American would elected to the presidency seemed unfathomable during an era when blacks were killed simply for registering to vote, Lewis said in 2008 after Obama won the first of two terms.

“When we were organizing voter registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought — I never dreamed — of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected president of the United States,” he said.

Lewis also bookended a lifelong passion inspired by a children’s comic book.

Just as he was introduced to the civil rights movement through a comic book, Lewis is the co-author of a series of graphic novels about his work in the civil rights movement. The third installment in the series, “March: Book Three,” won the National Book Award in 2016.

“Some of you know I grew up in rural Alabama, very poor, very few books in our home,” Lewis said in an acceptance speech with co-author Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell. “I remember in 1956, when I was 16 years old, going to the public library to get library cards, and we were told the library was for whites only and not for coloreds. And to come here and receive this honor, it’s too much.”

Lewis was preceded in death by his wife of 44 years, Lillian, who died in 2012. Their son, John Miles, survives.