John Lewis, who went from being the youngest leader of the 1963 March on Washington to a long-serving congressman from Georgia and icon of the civil rights movement, died Friday. He was 80. In December 2019, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Advertisement
As a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was a committed participant in some of the key moments of the movement - an original Freedom Rider in 1961, a principal speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, one of those brutally clubbed during a 1965 march in Selma, Ala. Through it all, he faced taunts, beatings and dozens of arrests.
"What we found, as we pushed our protests deeper into the heart of segregated society, was that our nonviolent actions were met with increasingly more violent responses."
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