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History > USA > Civil rights > Activists
John Lewis 1940-2020
John Lewis March 2009 Washington DC
Photograph: Jeff Hutchens Getty images
John Lewis remembered by Bryan Stevenson 21 February 1940 – 17 July 2020 The US lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative pays tribute to the pioneering US civil rights leader and congressman G Thu 17 Dec 2020 10.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/17/
John Lewis and Amelia Boynton Robinson (in wheelchair), hold hands with Barack Obama and Michelle Obama on the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, 2015.
Both Lewis and Boynton Robinson were badly beaten that day.
Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Civil rights activist and politician John Lewis – a life in pictures The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers. G Sat 18 Jul 2020 11.57 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2020/jul/18/
Lewis is arrested in April 2009, during a protest against the humanitarian crisis in Darfur outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington.
Photograph: Bill Clark/ Getty Image
Civil rights activist and politician John Lewis – a life in pictures The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers. G Sat 18 Jul 2020 11.57 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2020/jul/18/
Mr. Lewis in June 1967. He had been “involved in a holy crusade,” he later said, and getting arrested had been “a badge of honor.”
Photograph: Sam Falk/The New York Times
John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80 Images of his beating at Selma shocked the nation and led to swift passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He was later called the conscience of the Congress. NYT Published July 17, 2020 Updated July 18, 2020, 2:26 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/
John Lewis, foreground, being beaten by a state trooper during the voting rights march in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965.
Photograph: Associated Press
John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80 Images of his beating at Selma shocked the nation and led to swift passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He was later called the conscience of the Congress. NYT Published July 17, 2020 Updated July 18, 2020, 2:26 a.m. ET https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/john-lewis-dead.html
Lewis as Chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, addressing marchers at the Lincoln Memorial in the March on Washington in August 1963.
This was where Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
Photograph: Bettman/Corbis
Civil rights activist and politician John Lewis – a life in pictures The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers. G Sat 18 Jul 2020 11.57 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2020/jul/18/
Related Steve Schapiro: Heroic Times – in pictures G Tuesday 19 December 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/dec/19/
A portrait of Lewis taken in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1963.
Photograph: Steve Schapiro/Corbis
Civil rights activist and politician John Lewis – a life in pictures The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers. G Sat 18 Jul 2020 11.57 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/gallery/2020/jul/18/
Related Steve Schapiro: Heroic Times – in pictures G Tuesday 19 December 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/dec/19/
John Lewis, Atlanta, Georgia. 1963
Civil rights leader John Lewis began his life in politics as a student and worked closely with Martin Luther King. He stayed true to his politics and in fact his dress code until his death. Here, dressed for sartotrial battle and peaceful protest, he wears a tab collar shirt, stripped tie and blazer.
Photograph: Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos
Black Ivy: A Style Revolution – in pictures Black Ivy looks back at a period in American history when Black men across the country adopted clothing seen by many as the preserve of a privileged elite and made it subversive, edgy and cool. From Miles Davis to Sidney Poitier, it was an era when a generation of people struggled for racial quality and civil rights G Wed 1 Dec 2021 09.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2021/dec/01/
John Lewis 1940-2020
On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
(...)
John Robert Lewis grew up with all the humiliations imposed by segregated rural Alabama.
He was born on Feb. 21, 1940, to Eddie and Willie Mae (Carter) Lewis near the town of Troy on a sharecropping farm owned by a white man.
After his parents bought their own farm — 110 acres for $300 — John, the third of 10 children, shared in the farm work, leaving school at harvest time to pick cotton, peanuts and corn.
Their house had no plumbing or electricity.
In the outhouse, they used the pages of an old Sears catalog as toilet paper.
John was responsible for taking care of the chickens.
He fed them and read to them from the Bible.
He baptized them when they were born and staged elaborate funerals when they died.
“I was truly intent on saving the little birds’ souls,” he wrote in his memoir, “Walking With the Wind” (1998).
“I could imagine that they were my congregation. And me, I was a preacher.”
His family called him “Preacher,” and becoming one seemed to be his destiny.
He drew inspiration by listening to a young minister named Martin Luther King on the radio and reading about the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott.
He finally wrote a letter to Dr. King, who sent him a round-trip bus ticket to visit him in Montgomery, in 1958.
By then, Mr. Lewis had begun his studies at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he worked as a dishwasher and janitor to pay for his education.
In Nashville, Mr. Lewis met many of the civil rights activists who would stage the lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns.
They included the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who was one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of civil disobedience and who led workshops on Gandhi and nonviolence.
He mentored a generation of civil rights organizers, including Mr. Lewis.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/
John Lewis was the 23-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers and already a veteran of the civil rights movement when he came to the capital 50 years ago this month to deliver a fiery call for justice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Mr. Lewis’s urgent cry — “We want our freedom, and we want it now!” — was eclipsed on the steps that day by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech.
But two years later, after Alabama State Police officers beat him and fractured his skull while he led a march in Selma, he was back in Washington to witness President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Today Mr. Lewis is a congressman from Georgia and the sole surviving speaker from the March on Washington in August 1963.
His history makes him the closest thing to a moral voice in the divided Congress.
At 73, [ - August 2013 ] he is still battling a half-century later.
With the Voting Rights Act in jeopardy now that the Supreme Court has invalidated one of its central provisions, Mr. Lewis, a Democrat, is fighting an uphill battle to reauthorize it.
He is using his stature as a civil rights icon to prod colleagues like the Republican leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, to get on board.
He has also met with the mother of Trayvon Martin and compared his shooting to the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.
Mr. Lewis has an answer for those who say the election of a black president was a fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream:
It was only “a down payment,” he said in an interview.
“There’s a lot of pain, a lot of hurt in America,” Mr. Lewis said in his office on Capitol Hill, which resembles a museum with wall-to-wall black-and-white photographs of the civil rights movement.
Current events, he said, “remind us of our dark past.” - August 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/15/
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https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2021/dec/01/
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/05/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/17/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/
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https://www.npr.org/2020/07/18/
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https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/
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