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(CNN) — John Robert Lewis, the son of sharecroppers who survived a brutal police beating during a historic 1965 march in Selma, Alabama, to become a leading figure in the civil rights movement and a longtime American congressman, died after a six month battle against cancer. He was 80 years old.
“It is with inconsolable pain and lasting sadness that we announce the passing of US Representative John Lewis,” his family said in a statement. “He was honored and respected as the conscience of the Congress of U.S and an icon of American history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother. He was an unconditional champion in the ongoing struggle to demand respect for the dignity and worth of each human being. He dedicated his entire life to nonviolent activism and was an outspoken advocate for the fight for equal justice in the United States. He will be deeply missed. ”
Lewis died the same day as the civil rights leader, the reverendo Cordy Tindell “CT” Vivian, who was 95 years old. The double death of civil rights icons comes as the nation is still grappling with racial unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests that have spread across the country.
It is another anguish in a year full of them, as the United States mourns the death of almost 140,000 Americans by covid-19 and struggles to control the virus.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, announced her death in a statement.
“Today, the United States mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes in the country’s history: Congressman John Lewis, the conscience of Congress,” said the California Democrat.
Lewis had promised to fight the disease after announcing in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which was discovered as a result of a routine medical visit and subsequent tests.
“I have been in some kind of fight, for freedom, equality, basic human rights, for most of my life. I have never faced a fight like the one I have now, ”he said in a statement at the time.
Lewis, a Democrat who served as the United States Representative in Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District for more than three decades, was widely viewed as a moral conscience of Congress due to his incarnation of nonviolent civil rights struggle for decades. His passionate oratory was backed by a long history of action that included, by his count, more than 40 arrests as he spoke out against racial and social injustice.
A follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., participated in sit-ins at the lunch counter, joined the Freedom Riders in defiance of segregated buses, and, at the age of 23, was a keynote speaker at the historic March of 1963 in Washington.
“Sometimes when I look back and think about it, how did we do what we did? How do we do it? We did not have a website. We didn’t have a cell phone, “Lewis said of the civil rights movement.
“But I felt that when we were sitting on those stools at the lunch bar, or going to the Freedom Ride, or marching from Selma to Montgomery, there was power and strength. Almighty God was there with us. ”
Lewis has said that King inspired his activism. Angered by the injustice of the Jim Crow South, he launched what he called “good trouble” with organized protests and sit-ins. In the early 1960s, he was a freedom rider, challenging segregation at interstate bus terminals throughout the south and in the nation’s capital.
“We do not want our freedom to be gradual; we want to be free now, ”he said at the time.
At age 25, Lewis helped lead a voting rights march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other protesters were greeted by heavily armed state and local police officers who attacked them with sticks, fracturing Lewis’s skull. The images of that “Bloody Sunday” shocked the nation and spurred support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, enacted by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“I left a little blood on that bridge,” he said years later. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death. “
Despite the attack and other beatings, Lewis never lost his activist spirit, taking him from protests to the politics. He was elected to the Atlanta city council in 1981, and then to Congress six years later.
Once in Washington, he focused on fighting poverty and helping younger generations by improving education and health care. She also co-wrote a series of graphic novels about the civil rights movement, which earned her a National Book Award.
Born on a cotton farm in Troy, Alabama, to a segregated nation on February 21, 1940, Lewis lived to see an African-American president-elect, a moment he said he never thought would come despite his decades of fighting for equality.
He described attending the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 as an “out-of-body” experience.
“When we organized voter registration campaigns, going to the Freedom Rides, sitting, coming here to Washington for the first time, being arrested, going to jail, beaten, I never thought, I never dreamed, the possibility that an African American would one day be elected President of the United States “, stated at that time.
In 2011, after more than 50 years on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Lewis received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was placed on his neck by the first black president of the United States.
Before the inauguration of Donald Trump In 2017, Lewis said he did not consider him a “legitimate” president, an astonishing rebuke from a sitting member of Congress toward an incoming president.
“I think the Russians were involved in helping this man be chosen. And they helped destroy Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, “said Lewis.
Trump he replied, calling Lewis “pure talk” and “no action” and said he should focus more on “fixing and helping” his district rather than “complaining” about Russia.
Lewis did not attend Trump’s inauguration.
“I said to students, ‘When you see something that is not right, that is not fair, you have a moral obligation to do something, to say something,'” Lewis said in the spring of 2018. “And Dr. King told us inspired to do just that. “
Lewis also believed in forgiveness.
He once described an incident from his youth, when he was beaten to bleeding by members of the Ku Klux Klan after trying to enter a “white waiting room.”
“Many years later, in February 2009, one of the men who had beaten us came to my Capitol Hill office, he was in his 70s, his son was in his 40s, and said, ‘Mr. Lewis, I am one of the people who beat you and your seatmate “on a bus,” Lewis said, adding that the man said he had been to the KKK. “He said, ‘I want to apologize. Will you accept my apology? ‘”
After accepting their apologies and hugging the father and son, the three cried together, Lewis recalled.
“It is power on the path of peace, the path of love,” Lewis said. “We should never, never hate. The way of love is a better way ”.
Jim Acosta and Haley Byrd of CNN contributed to this report.
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