Saloni Subha ( Intern Journalist ) John Lewis, the civil rights activist who marched with Martin Luther King Jr and was nearly killed in police beatings before serving for decades as a US Congressman, died on Friday aged 80.
The African-American icon spent his life getting into what he called “good trouble” the confrontation necessary to improve American democracy by ending discrimination and racial injustice.
“Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history”, House Speaker Nancy also of the 17-term Congressman from Georgia. The son of a sharecropper, Lewis was just 21 when he became a founding member of the Freedom Riders who fought segregation of the US transportation system in the early 1960s, eventually becoming one of the nation’s most powerful voices for justice and equality.
He was the youngest leader of the 1963 March on Washington in which King delivered his famous speech “I have a dream”.Two years later Lewis nearly died while leading hundreds of Marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on a peace march to Montgomery when state troopers, seeking to intimidate those demonstrating for voting rights for black American, attacked protestors.
He suffered a fractured skull on the day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday”. Lewis entered Congress in 1986 and quickly became a figure of moral authority. Lewis had steeped away from his congressional duties in recent months as he underwent treatment for cancer.
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