From Leading Civil Rights Movements to Serving In Congress | The Story Of John Robert Lewis

John Robert Lewis is an American politician and civil rights leader. He was born on February 21, 1940, near Troy, Alabama, U.S). Lewis was the son of Alabama sharecroppers. He attended segregated schools and was encouraged by his parents not to challenge the inequities of the Jim Crow South. As a teenager, he was inspired by the courageous defiance of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., to whose attention Lewis came when he indicated his desire to desegregate Troy State college (now Troy State University). Dissuaded from doing so by his parents, Lewis instead was educated in Nashville at the American Baptist Theological Institute and Fisk University (B.A in religion and philosophy, 1967).

There, Lewis undertook the study of nonviolent protest and became involved in sit-ins at lunch counters and other segregated public places. In 1961, while participating in the Freedom Rides that challenged the segregation of Southern interstate bus terminals, Lewis was beaten and arrested-experiences he would repeat often. In 1963, he was elected as the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also known as SNCC. In his early 20s, Lewis was considered one of the “Big Six” leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. Lewis played many key roles in the Civil Rights Movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States.

He is now the U.S. Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district, serving in his 17th term in the House, having served since 1987, and is the senior member of the Georgia congressional delegation. Lewis is known for leading the march that was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” He was awarded the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize in 1975, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Spingarn Medal in 2002. In 2011 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also wrote several books and a graphic novel series called the March trilogy which was based on Lewis’s experiences in the civil rights movement.