Civil Rights Icon Dies

Rep. John Lewis 80, the longtime Georgia Congressman and icon of the civil rights movement, died after a battle with pancreatic cancer, Friday July 17, 2020. His death represents the end of an era, not only for Congress but for the country as a whole. A survivor of Alabama's "Bloody Sunday" massacre in 1965 and a protegé of Martin Luther King Jr. who would ultimately inspire Barack Obama to enter public office, Lewis was one of the last living leaders of the civil rights movement. A member of Congress for more than thirty years, he channeled all he had learned from his fight for equality as a young man into empowering youth and minority communities and encouraging activism. After the election of President Donald Trump he became, in his mid 70s, a self-defined active leader of the resistance movement, boycotting the 2017 inauguration and delivering an impassioned speech on the need to impeach the President last October. "He was known as one of the most dedicated, principled, courageous civil rights activists of all," Clayborne Carson, a historian and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, told TIME. "There were a lot of people who I apply those adjectives to, but I think he exemplified them as well or better than anyone else." John Lewis was a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation – from the determination with which he met discrimination at lunch counters and on Freedom Rides, to the courage he showed as a young man facing down violence and death on Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years. "We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before," Lewis told a cheering crowd. "I'm gonna continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before." Alana Abramson Time

Photo Congressman John Lewis-D Ga. Speaking at Southern University in 2014.