John Lewis: The Georgia lawmaker had been suffering from Stage IV pancreatic cancer since December.
John Lewis dies at 80 (PIC credit - CNN)
John Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanise opposition to racial segregation, and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, has died. He was 80.
The Georgia lawmaker had been suffering from Stage IV pancreatic cancer since December. Lewis’ death was confirmed by a House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a statement on Friday night.
Lewis was the last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, led by the Rev Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested, jailed and beaten for challenging Jim Crow laws, Lewis became a national figure in his early 20s.
When his parents learned that he had been arrested in Nashville, he wrote, they were ashamed. They had taught him as a child to accept the world as he found it. When he asked them about signs saying “Colored Only,” they told him, “That’s the way it is, don’t get in trouble.”
But as an adult, he said, after he met Dr King and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man was a flashpoint for the civil rights movement, he was inspired to “get into trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”He became a community activist and member of the Atlanta City Council before winning a seat in Congress in 1986.
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He would go on to become a best-selling author and in 2011 was awarded the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president. Lewis was elected to his 17th term in November 2018.
Getting into “good trouble” became his motto for life. A documentary film, “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” was released this month. “My greatest fear is that one day we may wake up and our democracy is gone,” Lewis, 80, says in the film.
