Civil Rights icon and longtime Georgia Congressman John Lewis was best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lewis was born in Troy, Alabama, on February 21, 1940, at a time when African Americans in the South were subjected to a humiliating segregation in education and all public facilities, and were effectively prevented from voting by systematic discrimination and intimidation. His parents were sharecroppers, poor farmers who rented a small piece of land for a share of the crop. The family raised cotton, corn, and peanuts and raised chickens and hogs. Life was difficult, and some years the family barely scraped by. Along with his parents and grandparents, Lewis and his siblings had to help around the farm, even if that meant missing school. As a child, he aspired to be a preacher, famously honing his craft by delivering sermons to chickens.
He also was interested in history, listening intently to the stories of the elders and asking why things happened as they had. One fact he kept questioning was segregation. Lewis’s awakening to the injustices of segregation came early in life. As he grew older, he began taking trips into Troy with his family, where he continued to have experiences of racism and segregation. When Lewis was 11, an uncle took him to Buffalo, New York, where he became acutely aware of the contrast with Troy's segregation. At age 15, Lewis preached his first public sermon. He also first heard the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in a sermon on the radio. Lewis recalls: “Dr. King’s message hit me like a bolt of lightning. He applied the principles of the church to what was happening now, today. It was called the social gospel—and I felt like he was preaching directly to me.” This experience cemented Lewis’s desires to fight segregation and to become a minister.
On December 1st 1955, African Americans in nearby Montgomery, Alabama, began their year-long boycott of the city’s segregated buses. Lewis followed the story in the newspaper and was riveted by radio broadcasts of speeches by King. At age 18, he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, for a personal meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. To fulfill the latter dream, Lewis applied to Troy State College; however, the all-White school never responded to his application. After writing to King about being denied admission to Troy University in Alabama, Lewis was invited to meet with him. King, who referred to Lewis as "the boy from Troy", discussed suing the university for discrimination, but he warned Lewis that doing so could endanger his family in Troy. After discussing it with his parents, Lewis applied to Nashville’s American Baptist College, which he chose because it allowed students to work in order to pay tuition.
Lewis started school in September of 1957. He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. As a freshman at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville in 1957, he tried to form a campus chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but the school shot the idea down. Like many Black colleges, American Baptist relied on white funding and didn’t want the risk of getting involved in the Movement. While at American Baptist, Lewis met James Lawson, a fellow seminary student who was conducting workshops on nonviolent protest. Lewis and other students became dedicated to the discipline and Gandhian philosophy of of nonviolence. To this degree, Lewis became involved and participated in a series of student sit-ins.
As a student he made a systematic study of the techniques and philosophy of nonviolence, and with his fellow students prepared thoroughly for their first actions in the fall of 1959. They began with sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. Day after day, Lewis and his fellow students sat silently at lunch counters where they were harassed, spat upon, beaten and finally arrested and held in jail, but they persisted in the sit-ins. The Nashville sit-in movement was responsible for the desegregation of lunch counters in the city's downtown. Lewis was arrested and jailed many times during the nonviolent activities to desegregate the city's downtown businesses. Later, Lewis looked back on his arrest, describing it as “like being involved in a holy crusade,” and considering it “a badge of honor". He was also instrumental in organizing bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests to support voting rights and racial equality. The next year, many of these Nashville students, including Lewis, helped form a new civil rights group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee in 1961, and was ordained as a Baptist minister. He then earned a bachelor's degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University. In 1961, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), led by James Farmer, Jr., wanted to challenge southern laws that segregated interstate bus travel and bus stations—both of which the Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional, in in Boynton v. Virginia. Lewis joined the riders, who left Washington, D.C., in two buses and set course for New Orleans on May 4, 1961. At age 21, John Lewis was the first of the Freedom Riders to be assaulted while in Rock Hill, South Carolina. As he later reflected: “We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal. We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had to make up our minds not to turn back”. When the Riders reached Anniston, AL, on Mother's Day, May 14, an angry mob firebombed the Greyhound bus and beat the fleeing riders.
In Birmingham, the Riders were beaten by an unrestrained mob including Klu Kux Klan members (notified of their arrival by police). One bus was firebombed, and several passengers were beaten while fleeing the burning bus. The riders were brutally beaten with police cooperation from Commissioner Bull Connor. CORE’s national director, James Farmer, decided the ride had become too dangerous to continue at that moment and suspended the rides. Lewis, fellow activist Diane Nash and other members of SNCC, insisted the movement continue, believing stopping would hand victory to segregationists. This was a turning point — leadership shifted from CORE’s national office to grassroots student activists. They arranged for students from Fisk to launched a second wave of rides.
The second group of Riders reorganized and rode to Montgomery, where they were met with more violence at the local Greyhound station. At that stop, Lewis was attacked and left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside a Greyhound Bus terminal in Montgomery, Alabama. There Lewis was hit in the head with a wooden crate. "It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious", said Lewis, remembering the incident. When they reached Montgomery, they were arrested. After being transported back to the Tennessee border, Nashville supporters came and picked them up and drove them to Nashville. They were determined to complete the original interstate route rather than create a new one. They returned to complete their ride to Birmingham, then continue to Montgomery, and on to Jackson, MS. When the weary riders arrive in Jackson only to be arrested. As a result of his Freedom Rider activities, Lewis was imprisoned for 40 days in the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary in Sunflower County.
The Freedom Rides continued all summer, although Lewis’s part was ended. That fall, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) declared that segregated interstate buses and terminals were illegal and that the law would be enforced. The Freedom Riders had won a victory. Lewis spent the next two years studying religion and philosophy at Fisk University and continuing to work with the SNCC. In 1963, he was elected chairman of the group, which had become one of the leading civil rights organizations. Lewis's experience was already widely respected. His courage and tenacious adherence to the philosophy of reconciliation and nonviolence had enabled him to emerge as a leader. He had already been arrested 24 times in the nonviolent movement for equal justice.
Lewis’s stature in the movement was confirmed that summer of 1963, when he and the SNCC helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which featured Dr. King as the main speaker. At age twenty-three, Lewis was the youngest speaker at the march’s main event, the rally at the Lincoln Memorial. He was the fourth of 12 speakers on the program that day, which ended with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s now-famous "I Have a Dream" speech. A. Philip Randolph preceded Lewis. James Farmer, Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins spoke between Lewis and King. The only women to speak at "The March", were Josephine Baker and Daisy Bates. Lewis had planned to denounce Kennedy's bill for failing to provide protection for African Americans against police brutality, or to provide African Americans with the means to vote. His speech was changed when other chairs of the march demanded revisions.
In 1964, the SNCC shifted its focus to voting rights. Many SNCC activists traveled to Mississippi to take part in what they called the Freedom Summer campaign. The voting rights drive still lacked support from the federal government, though. Bob Moses began preparing for the SNCC to begin the campaign for voter registration in the Mississippi Delta. Moses wished to open a Voter Registration School in the Delta, a region of Mississippi where the population was overwhelmingly African American. Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts to engage college student activists in aiding the campaign. Lewis traveled the country, encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people vote in Mississippi, which had the lowest number of registered Black voters.
The following spring, Lewis and civil rights activist Hosea Williams organized one of the most famous marches in United States history. On March 7, 1965 – a day that would become known as "Bloody Sunday" – Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge and the city-county boundary, they were met by Alabama State Troopers who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with nightsticks. Lewis, at the forefront, sustained a fractured skull after a state trooper hit him with a billy club, knocked him to the ground, and hit him again when he tried to get back up.
Two days later, Dr. King led 1,000 members of the clergy on a second march from Selma to Montgomery, with the eyes of the world watching. A photograph of the Selma March in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s collections depicts Lewis, King and other civil rights leaders standing arm in arm. The march, and the violence visited upon it, spurred sympathy for the Civil Rights movement. A week and a day after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress to demand passage of the Voting Rights Acts. The law guaranteed voting rights to Black Americans by striking down literacy tests they were required to take before registering to vote and replaced segregationist voting registrars with federal registrars. The passage of the voting rights act finally brought the federal government into the struggle, squarely on the side of the disenfranchised voters of the South.
Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, became law it didn’t make it any easier for African Americans in the South to vote. By this time, some members of SNCC had grown disillusioned with the nonviolent approach—a position Lewis never abandoned. In 1966, he was replaced as head of the organization by Stokely Carmichael, who took the group in a more militant direction. Soon White activists began to leave SNCC. This trend increased when Hubert “Rap” Brown, a radical and controversial advocate for Black armed self-defense, became the leader of SNCC in May 1967. One year later, Rap Brown led SNCC into a public alliance with the Black Panther Party. With the expulsion of Whites, SNCC’s annual income dropped sharply. Local direct-action grassroots projects were scaled back. Finally, in December 1973, SNCC ceased to exist as an organization.
Throughout the devastating assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he continued the national fight for equality. As director of the Voter Education Project in 1970, as a result of all these efforts. In 1977, he was named by President Jimmy Carter to head ACTION, a federal agency that coordinated volunteer work. In 1981, Lewis won a seat on the Atlanta City Council, where he became an effective advocate of neighborhood preservation and government reform. Five years later, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986, when he defeated his long time friend Julian Bond. Lewis was "endorsed by the Atlanta newspapers and a favorite of the White liberal establishment". His victory was due to strong results among White voters (a minority in the district).
Lewis represented Georgia's 5th congressional district, one of the most consistently Democratic districts in the nation. Lewis was one of the most liberal congressmen to have represented a district in the Deep South. In addition to becoming one of the most respected congressmen, Lewis also helped oversee several renewals of the Voting Rights Act. In Congress, Lewis focused on such causes as civil rights, women’s rights, and peace. Though his constituents were in Atlanta, he championed causes that affected Americans across the country. During his time in Congress, he was the senior chief deputy whip for the Democratic Party in leadership in the House, a member of the House Ways & Means Committee, and chairman of its Oversight Subcommittee.
Lewis received numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize. In 2011, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Still in office, he died on July 17, 2020, at the age of eighty. Lewis was married to Lillian Mills from 1968 until her death in 2012. One of the key figures of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Lewis was a leader in at least four of the movement’s most notable campaigns: the Freedom Rides the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, and the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. Arrested dozens of times and beaten many times, he never wavered from his belief in and practice of non-violence. As Lewis’s life shows, meaningful advocacy can take a variety of forms: Organizing, writing, and voting are all options for encouraging meaningful change.