Civil Rights Movement Famous Figures: John Lewis

An African-American civil rights leader who was bloodied by police and white mobs during protests in the 1960s, John Robert Lewis later served as a congressman known for his unflagging support of racial integration. He was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, to Eddie Lewis and Willie Mae Lewis.

Raised in a sharecropping family amid dusty cottonfields near Troy, John Lewis showed at an early age a desire to become a preacher; at seven years old he would stand in front of the chickens on his farm and preach to them (and become upset whenever one of them was taken away to be slaughtered). Throughout his childhood Lewis attended racially segregated schools.
Pursuing his desire to preach, Lewis briefly attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, but then decided he wanted to break the color barrier back home at Troy State College. Since Lewis had avidly followed the Montgomery bus boycott and admired Martin Luther King, Jr., he asked King to support his intended attempt to enter Troy State. Lewis's plans collapsed, however, when his parents objected to his doing anything that might cause trouble. So he instead enrolled at all-black Fisk University in Nashville.

Ironically, at Fisk he had intimate contact with the “trouble” his parents had wanted him to avoid. He learned about theories of nonviolent protest, especially after he began attending student workshops run by James Lawson, a black pacifist theologian. Then in February 1960, stirred by the sit-ins staged by African-American college students at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, he joined other protesters at sit-ins in Nashville. Over a span of six weeks he was arrested four times but held steadfast to his goal of destroying segregation.

In April 1960 Lewis attended the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Raleigh, North Carolina. The following year he volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides campaign, whereby white and black civil rights workers aimed to challenge the segregated bus terminals common in the South by defying the laws that required the races to use separate restrooms, restaurants, and waiting areas. Lewis may well have been thinking back to his childhood when he peered into the clean washroom reserved for whites at the Troy bus station and then had to use the dirty washroom set aside for blacks.

The Freedom Riders knew that once the buses they were on reached the Deep South, their lives would be in danger. And they were right; at Rock Hill, South Carolina, a white mob bloodied Lewis and several other Freedom Riders. More violence followed at Anniston, Alabama, and then again at Montgomery, where club-wielding thugs smashed Lewis over the head. But he stayed with the Freedom Ride to its final stop, in Jackson, Mississippi, where the police threw him into jail, and he spent 30 days at the Parchment Prison Farm.
Lewis lost a race for Georgia's Fifth Congressional District and then ran for the Atlanta City Council, wining a seat in 1982 by promising to help the poor and elderly. He ran again for Congress in 1986, this time going up against a fellow black civil rights worker, Julian Bond, in the Democratic primary. Most observers expected Bond to win, but Lewis waged a strong, even vicious, campaign, in which he accused Bond of using drugs. After winning the primary, Lewis easily won the general election. In 2016, Lewis was reelected for his 16th consecutive term.

As a congressman Lewis continued to pursue his civil rights agenda, tied to his belief in a racially integrated society. He stuck to his program even after blacks who had lost faith in integration and wanted to maintain distinctive black institutions accused him of being a dinosaur.

In the mid-1990s Lewis vigorously attacked Republican conservatives intent on dismantling civil rights and welfare legislation. About them, in 1995 he warned, “They’re coming for the children. They’re coming for the poor. They’re coming for the sick, the elderly, and the disabled.” In 1998 Lewis published his book Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, and in 2001 he and Republican congressman J. C. Watts of Oklahoma convinced Congress to pass legislation honoring the slaves who had helped build the Capitol. Throughout his career in Congress, Lewis advocated for the creation of a museum devoted to documenting the African-Americane experience. A bill funding the project was signed in 2003, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture was opened in Washington, D.C., in 2016.

Although Lewis initially endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential campaign, he later shifted his support to Barack Obama. President Obama awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. In 2015, Lewis and Obama led thousands across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the historic Selma march. Lewis also recorded his memories of the protest in March, a trilogy of graphic novels. The series won numerous honors, including the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award (book one), the Eisner Award (book two), and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature (book three).

Despite Lewis's notable record in Congress, he will likely be most remembered for his fortitude in the 1960s civil rights struggle, much as historian Sean Wilentz described him in a 1996 article for The New Republic as “a valiant, bloodied hero of the nation's greatest domestic struggle” in the 20th century.