John Lewis was a sharecropper’s son from rural Alabama who became one of the most persistent practitioners of nonviolent direct action in American history. As a Nashville student activist, Freedom Rider, and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was arrested and beaten repeatedly; on 7 March 1965 Alabama state troopers fractured his skull at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He then carried the movement’s agenda into the U.S. House of Representatives, where he represented Atlanta for more than three decades.
At a Glance
- Born
- 21 February 1940, near Troy, Pike County, Alabama
- Died
- 17 July 2020, Atlanta, Georgia
- Birth name
- John Robert Lewis
- Known for
- Nashville sit-ins and 1961 Freedom Rides; chairman of SNCC (1963–1966); Bloody Sunday, Selma (7 March 1965); March trilogy (2013–2016)
- HBCU ties
- American Baptist College (Graduated from American Baptist Theological Seminary, Nashville, 1961); Fisk University (Bachelor’s degree, 1967)
- Fields
- Civil Rights · Politics
- Era
- Civil Rights Era
Early Life
Lewis was born on 21 February 1940 outside Troy, in Pike County, Alabama, one of ten children of Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis, sharecroppers who later bought their own small farm. He grew up in a segregated county where Black residents were largely barred from voting, attended poorly funded Black schools, and, by his own account in his memoir, practiced preaching to the family’s chickens as a boy. Hearing Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio during the Montgomery Bus Boycott drew him toward the movement.
Denied admission to the all-white Troy State College, Lewis wrote to King, who met with him in 1958 and discussed a possible lawsuit; Lewis decided not to pursue it for fear of reprisals against his family. He instead enrolled at American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, graduating in 1961, and later earned a second bachelor’s degree from Fisk University in 1967. In Nashville he attended the workshops on nonviolence led by the Reverend James Lawson, alongside Diane Nash, James Bevel, and other students who would form the core of the Nashville movement.
Life and Work
In 1960 Lewis helped lead the Nashville sit-ins against segregated lunch counters, and he was arrested for the first time that year. He was a founding participant in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organized in April 1960. In May 1961 he joined the Congress of Racial Equality’s Freedom Rides to test federal rulings against segregated interstate travel; on 9 May he was beaten by a white mob at the Greyhound terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina. When the original ride was halted by violence in Alabama, he was among the Nashville students who resumed it, was attacked again in Montgomery, and was jailed in Mississippi’s Parchman penitentiary.
Elected SNCC chairman in 1963 at age 23, Lewis became one of the “Big Six” leaders who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and on 28 August 1963 he was the youngest speaker at the Lincoln Memorial. His draft text, which sharply criticized the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill, was toned down at the insistence of other march leaders shortly before he spoke. Under his chairmanship SNCC helped carry out the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project and expanded voter-registration work in Alabama and Mississippi.
On Sunday, 7 March 1965, Lewis and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led about 600 marchers out of Selma toward Montgomery to demand voting rights. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Alabama state troopers and a sheriff’s posse attacked them with clubs and tear gas; Lewis suffered a fractured skull. Televised images of “Bloody Sunday” helped push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed on 6 August 1965. In 1966, as SNCC turned toward Black Power, members replaced Lewis as chairman with Stokely Carmichael, and he left the organization.
Lewis directed the Voter Education Project in Atlanta beginning in 1970, supporting registration drives across the South. President Jimmy Carter appointed him associate director of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency, where he served from 1977 to 1980. Elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981, he won Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District in 1986 after defeating his former SNCC colleague Julian Bond in the Democratic primary runoff. He served in the House from 3 January 1987 until his death, sitting on the Ways and Means Committee, serving as a chief deputy whip, and becoming known as the “conscience of the Congress.” He pressed for voting-rights protections after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, led legislation creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and in 2016 led a sit-in on the House floor demanding votes on gun-control measures. By his own count he was arrested more than forty times during the movement years, and several more times as a member of Congress.
Legacy
Lewis announced in December 2019 that he had advanced pancreatic cancer and died in Atlanta on 17 July 2020, at 80. His body lay in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on 27–28 July 2020, after a final crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. President Barack Obama had awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. In 1968 he had married Lillian Miles, a librarian at Atlanta University, who died in 2012; their son, John-Miles Lewis, survived him.
He told his own story in the memoir Walking with the Wind (1998), written with Michael D’Orso, and in the graphic-novel trilogy March, created with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. March: Book Three won the 2016 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the first graphic novel to receive a National Book Award. His insistence on what he called “good trouble” — disciplined, nonviolent confrontation with unjust law — linked the student movement of 1960 to the voting-rights fights of the twenty-first century.
John Lewis practiced disciplined nonviolence from the Nashville sit-ins to the floor of Congress, linking the student movement of 1960 to the voting-rights fights of the twenty-first century. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 21 February 1940 Born near Troy, Pike County, Alabama.
- 1960 Helps lead the Nashville sit-ins; joins the founding of SNCC.
- 9 May 1961 Beaten by a mob in Rock Hill, South Carolina, during the Freedom Rides.
- 1963 Elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
- 28 August 1963 Youngest speaker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
- 7 March 1965 Skull fractured by Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday.
- 1970 Becomes director of the Voter Education Project.
- 1981 Elected to the Atlanta City Council.
- 3 January 1987 Sworn in as U.S. Representative for Georgia’s Fifth District.
- 17 July 2020 Dies in Atlanta; lies in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
Sources and Further Reading
- John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
- John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, March, 3 vols. (Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2013–2016).
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “LEWIS, John R.” Link
- New Georgia Encyclopedia, “John Lewis (1940–2020).” Link
- SNCC Digital Gateway, “John Lewis.” Link
- National Book Foundation, March: Book Three, 2016 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Link
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