{"id":10396,"date":"2020-07-20T07:20:48","date_gmt":"2020-07-20T14:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=10396"},"modified":"2020-07-20T07:20:48","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T14:20:48","slug":"john-lewis-civil-rights-icon-and-congressman-dies-at-80-the-new-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=10396","title":{"rendered":"“John Lewis, Civil Rights Icon and Congressman, Dies at 80”, The New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Katharine Q. Seelye, front page lead, Sunday New York Times, July 19, 2020<\/span><\/p>\n

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Images of his beating at Selma shocked the nation and led to swift passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He was later called the conscience of the Congress.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Representative John Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality, and who then carried a mantle of moral authority into Congress, died on Friday. He was 80.<\/p>\n

His death was confirmed in a statement<\/a> by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives.<\/p>\n

Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, announced on Dec. 29 that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer<\/a> and vowed to fight it with the same passion with which he had battled racial injustice. \u201cI have been in some kind of fight \u2014 for freedom, equality, basic human rights \u2014 for nearly my entire life,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.<\/p>\n

More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd<\/a>, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against police killings of Black people and, more broadly, against systemic racism in many corners of society. He saw those protests as a continuation of his life\u2019s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sidelines.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets \u2014 to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call \u2018good trouble,\u2019\u201d Mr. Lewis told \u201cCBS This Morning\u201d in June.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThis feels and looks so different,\u201d he said of the Black Lives Matter movement, which drove the anti-racism demonstrations. \u201cIt is so much more massive and all inclusive.\u201d He added, \u201cThere will be no turning back.\u201d<\/p>\n

He died on the same day as did another civil rights stalwart, the Rev. C.T. Vivian<\/a>, a close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

Mr. Lewis\u2019s personal history paralleled that of the civil rights movement. He was among the original 13 Freedom Riders<\/a>, the Black and white activists who challenged segregated interstate travel in the South in 1961. He was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee<\/a>, which coordinated lunch-counter sit-ins. He helped organize the March on Washington, where Dr. King was the main speaker, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.<\/p>\n

Mr. Lewis led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks and swimming pools, and he rose up against other indignities of second-class citizenship. At nearly every turn he was beaten, spat upon or burned with cigarettes. He was tormented by white mobs and absorbed body blows from law enforcement.<\/p>\n

On March 7, 1965, he led one of the most famous marches in American history<\/a>. In the vanguard of 600 people demanding the voting rights they had been denied, Mr. Lewis marched partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a waiting phalanx of state troopers in riot gear.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Ordered to disperse, the protesters silently stood their ground. The troopers responded with tear gas and bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. In the melee, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, a trooper cracked Mr. Lewis\u2019s skull with a billy club, knocking him to the ground, then hit him again when he tried to get up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n