John Lewis

Biography

John Lewis was born in 1940 to sharecroppers near Troy, Alabama. Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott, he studied at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where he was ordained, and later earned a degree from Fisk University.

In Nashville he helped lead the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins and in 1961 joined the Freedom Rides, enduring repeated arrests and beatings. He was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and chaired it from 1963 to 1966, speaking at the March on Washington and coordinating the 1964 Freedom Summer voter drive in Mississippi. On 7 March 1965 he led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where state troopers beat them and fractured his skull.

After leaving SNCC he worked for the Field Foundation and the Southern Regional Council, directed the Voter Education Project from 1970 to 1977, and served in the Carter administration's volunteer agency ACTION. He won a seat on the Atlanta City Council in 1981.

Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia's 5th district in 1986, he served 17 terms, rose to senior chief deputy whip for the Democrats and in 2016 led a sit-in on the House floor over gun legislation. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and died in office in 2020.