Johnson presented to a joint session of Congress eight days later and signed into law on Aug. Lewis and scores of others outraged the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. He was tormented by white mobs and absorbed body blows from law enforcement. At nearly every turn he was beaten, spat upon or burned with cigarettes. Lewis led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks and swimming pools, and he rose up against other indignities of second-class citizenship. King was the main speaker, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He helped organize the March on Washington, where Dr. He was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated lunch-counter sit-ins. He was among the original 13 Freedom Riders, the Black and white activists who challenged segregated interstate travel in the South in 1961. Lewis’s personal history paralleled that of the civil rights movement. He died on the same day as another civil rights stalwart, the Rev. “It is so much more massive and all inclusive.” He added, “There will be no turning back.” “This feels and looks so different,” he said of the Black Lives Matter movement, which drove the anti-racism demonstrations. “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,’” Mr. He saw those protests as a continuation of his life’s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sidelines. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against police killings of Black people and, more broadly, against systemic racism in many corners of society.

More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr.

Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. 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. “I have been in some kind of fight - for freedom, equality, basic human rights - for nearly my entire life,” he said. 29 that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and vowed to fight it with the same passion with which he had battled racial injustice. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, announced on Dec. His death was confirmed in a statement by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives. Representative John Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality, and who then carried a mantle of moral authority into Congress, died on Friday.

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