Civil rights legend John Lewis Rep died at the age of 80

John Robert Lewis, Selma, Alabama, at a 1965 landmark, became a figure in the civil rights movement and is a longtime U.S. congressman. cancer. He was 80 years old. Lewis, a Democrat who represented the U.S. in the 5th congressional district of Georgia for three decades, was very much of a moral conscience in Congress because he embodied a nonviolent fight against civil rights for decades. His passionate oratory was full of action. His amount included more than 40 arrests, a demonstration against racial and social injustice. Follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. He attended lunch warehouses on segregated buses that met Freedom Riders. And at the age of 23, he was the keynote speaker on March 18, 1963 in Washington. “Sometimes when I look back and think, how did we do what? How did we succeed? We didn’t have a website. We didn’t have a cell phone,” Lewis said of the civil rights movement. . “But when I was sitting in those lunch chairs, or going to the Freedom Walk, or going from Selma to Montgomery, there was a power and a strength. The Almighty of God was with us.” Lewis said King inspired his activism. Angry at Jim Crow South’s injustices, he launched what he called “good problems” with organized protests and imprisonment. In the early 1960s, he was a Freedom Cyclist, with heavy segregation at bus terminals in the Southern and national capitals. “We don’t want our freedom gradually; we want to be free now,” he said then. At the age of 25, Lewis helped lead a march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other marquees met with armed states and local police who attacked clubs, breaking Lewis ’skull. Images of that “Bloody Sunday” shocked the nation and galvanized support for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson into law. “I donated some blood on that bridge,” he said a few years later. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death.” Despite the attack and other blows, Lewis never lost his activist spirit, moving from protests to politics. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981, then to Congress six years later. #JohnLewis #CNN #Notes.

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