July 18, 2020
"The fare was paid in blood."
That was how Lewis put it years later, in his graphic novel "March." For Lewis, it was, most certainly.
It's one thing to stand up for a cause. It's something else to be willing to be knocked down, bleeding, over and over again for that cause. That's what Lewis did.
He was beaten outside a whites-only restroom during the first Freedom Ride in 1961.
After the Riders met so much violent resistance that the original organizer gave it up, Lewis and a friend kept the Freedom Ride going.
Lewis spent weeks in a notorious prison farm after being arrested in Mississippi. But later that year, all interstate travel facilities were integrated.
In 1963, Lewis was the youngest and most radical speaker at the history-making Walk on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
Lewis had his skull fractured in 1965 in a march for voting rights as the group tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. The Voting Rights Act became law later that year.
Lewis's friends got used to him showing up with fresh bandages in new places when he came to meetings of groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he helped found.
Even before that, when he was still just 19, Lewis was in the first sit-in at a Woolworth's dining counter in North Carolina.
Lewis became a Georgia congressman in 1986 and remained in that position the rest of his life. He applied the dogged hard-work ethic he learned as the child of sharecroppers to continue his fight for civil rights. Year after year, Lewis introduced legislation for the National Museum of African American History and Culture every year until it passed in 2003. The museum is on the National Mall. "The fare was paid in blood."
That was how Lewis put it years later, in his graphic novel "March." For Lewis, it was, most certainly.
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John Lewis receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama on February 15, 2011. |
He was beaten outside a whites-only restroom during the first Freedom Ride in 1961.
After the Riders met so much violent resistance that the original organizer gave it up, Lewis and a friend kept the Freedom Ride going.
Lewis spent weeks in a notorious prison farm after being arrested in Mississippi. But later that year, all interstate travel facilities were integrated.
In 1963, Lewis was the youngest and most radical speaker at the history-making Walk on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
Lewis had his skull fractured in 1965 in a march for voting rights as the group tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama. The Voting Rights Act became law later that year.
Lewis's friends got used to him showing up with fresh bandages in new places when he came to meetings of groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he helped found.
Even before that, when he was still just 19, Lewis was in the first sit-in at a Woolworth's dining counter in North Carolina.
He was instrumental in getting the Voting Rights Act reauthorized and in having a "minority health research center" instituted at the National Institutes of Health.
He was called the "Conscience of the Congress" and received the Presidential Medal of Honor from Barack Obama in 2011.
Lewis and his wife, who died in 2012, had one child, a son named John-Miles.
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