John Lewis

John Robert Lewis was born on 21 February 1940 near Troy, Alabama, to sharecropper parents, and grew up preaching to the family chickens as a child, an early expression of the oratorical calling that would later define his life. Denied entry to his local library because of his race, he became determined to fight segregation, and as a teenager he wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. seeking help attending a segregated Alabama university, beginning a mentorship and friendship that would shape his entire career.

Lewis became deeply involved in the civil rights movement while studying at Fisk University and American Baptist Theological Seminary, training in nonviolent protest tactics and participating in the Nashville sit-in movement targeting segregated lunch counters. He became one of the original thirteen Freedom Riders in 1961, testing federal desegregation rulings on interstate bus travel across the Deep South, enduring severe beatings by white mobs at several stops along the route.

In 1963 Lewis, at just 23 years old, became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was one of the 'Big Six' civil rights leaders who organised the March on Washington, delivering a speech that day alongside Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' address — Lewis's original draft was considered so forcefully critical of the Kennedy administration's civil rights record that organisers negotiated significant revisions shortly before he spoke, making him the youngest speaker at the historic event.

On 7 March 1965, Lewis led some 600 peaceful marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in a demonstration for voting rights that became known as 'Bloody Sunday' after Alabama state troopers violently attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas; Lewis suffered a fractured skull in the assault, and television footage of the brutal attack, broadcast nationally, generated public outrage that directly accelerated passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 later that year.

Lewis continued civil rights and community organising work through the following decade before entering electoral politics, winning election to Atlanta's City Council in 1981 and then to the US House of Representatives in 1986, a seat he would hold for over three decades until his death. In Congress, Lewis became widely known as the 'Conscience of the Congress,' consistently championing voting rights, healthcare access and civil liberties, and periodically leading acts of civil disobedience even as a sitting member of Congress, including a 2016 sit-in on the House floor demanding gun control legislation.

Lewis received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2011, and continued serving in Congress and speaking publicly about the ongoing struggle for voting rights until shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer in July 2020. In one of his final public acts, he visited the Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House weeks before his death, connecting the movement of his youth to the new generation of activists continuing the fight. He left behind an essay published posthumously in the New York Times on the day of his funeral, urging continued 'good trouble, necessary trouble' in pursuit of justice — a phrase that had become his defining personal motto throughout his six decades of activism.