Civil rights activists have been committed to non-violent protest and the Independent Democratic Congress for six decades.
The life of John Lewis, a member of the U.S. Congress who died at the age of 80 from pancreatic cancer, is an example of the history of racial relations in America during those eight decades. Born alone, Louis played a leading role as a young man against civil rights and was at the heart of many important and dangerous events in that movement. Ignoring the friendly voices warning him not to put too much pressure against apartheid in large parts of America, he was repeatedly arrested by the Klux Klan and the police and had to move steadily. Done.
The changes he struggled with came into existence when he elected himself to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he held leadership positions and was called a "congressional conscience" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. When he saw a black-elected president, he saw that many of the hardships of his movement had been reversed by reactionary judges, senators, and indeed the president.
As a leader of the Nashville student movement in Tennessee, he was arrested several times during his campaign career while conducting sit-ins against various restaurants and bus services in the city of Louis. In 1960, he and Nashville colleagues Diane Nash and Marion Barry (future mayor of Washington) founded the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founding center in Greensboro, North Carolina, along with a similar student body. "Snick"), promoted by Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but widely committed to student-led local action. Other SNCC leaders include future Black Power leader Stokeley Carmichael and future Georgian politician Julian Bond of Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Louis was one of 13 original Freedom Riders organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (Core). Riders saw the issue in effect in 1961 when traveling through the southern states, as interstate bus travel was regulated by a federal law prohibiting partitioning. While trying to use facilities only for whites at a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Louis became Louis. The first man attacked when two men beat him.
The entire group was attacked in Aniston, Alabama, other buses were set on fire and one was set on fire. When the main leader James Farmer sets out to stop the ride due to violence, Louis, Nash, and his Nashville team take him away. Louis eventually spent 40 days in prison in Mississippi, with Attorney General Robert Kennedy calling for a "cooling" period and a ride stop.
Louis became president of the SNCC in 1963, one of the organizers of the "Big Six" March in Washington, where King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Louis left an important line - "Which side is our government on?" - Through his own speech, Kennedy persuaded other leaders not to denigrate the administration. The following year, the Mississippi Freedom Summer's SNCC-led Louise led the charge, which saw the assassinations of civil rights activists James Channy, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County.
In 1965, Louis and Hossi Williams led the Independence March over the Edmund Petes Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where they were attacked by state soldiers, police, and spectators. Violent scenes were broadcast across the country, with bleeding from Louis's baton breaking his skull. His televised interview calling for action by calling on President Lyndon Johnson was a crucial moment in gaining public support for equal rights.
Louis left SNCC in 1966 to become chairman of the Voter Education Project, which aims to register minority voters. In 1977, he ran for a congressional seat in Atlanta vacated by Andrew Young when he became Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations, but lost to Fowler, who left the Democratic primary, and instead joined the Carter administration's campaign program, consolidating several voluntary schemes. Vista, including the domestic version of the Peace Corps. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981, and in 1986, when Fowler left the House to run for the U.S. Senate, Louis ignored civil rights activism against his old friend Bond. A bitter primary battle was waged to replace them. He was accused of corruption and drug use.
Louis won the primary by a landslide and then easily competed for a secure Democratic seat. He was re-elected 16 times, not re-elected six times, with less than 69% of the vote. Considered one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress, he is seriously independent. He previously voted against the Iraq war, George W. Bush. Bush boycotted the inauguration, believing his election was illegal due to voter fraud in Florida, as well as refusing to attend Donald Trump's inauguration in 2016.
He voted for Bush to propose emergency powers after the 9/11 attacks, although he later called for impeachment for abusing his powers. Ironically, Bush signed into law in 2003 when Louis entered Congress each year to establish the Museum of African American History in Washington. Opposition to his policy is bilateral. He has clashed with Bill Clinton several times, including the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Never losing his faith in the power of protest, he was arrested twice at the Sudanese embassy, once against the genocide in Darfur and once from Congress calling for immigration reform. He led a 26-hour sit-in in the House after the Senate refused to take action on gun control in the wake of the 2016 Orlando massacre.
He backed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2008, but backed Barack Obama in February, calling his candidacy for the United States a "great height." After the Obama election, Louis was asked if this could fulfill the King's dream. He replied: "It's a down payment."
He backed Hillary in 2016 against his rival Bernie Saunders, who stated in the SNCC chair from 1963 to 1965 that "I never saw him, I never met him ... but I met Hillary Clinton". This was controversial because Saunders was arrested in Chicago in 1963 for protesting for civil rights, while Hillary was still in school and a supporter of the Republican "Gold Rights" states.
John was born in Troy, Alabama. His mother, Willie May (Nee Carter), and father, Eddie Lewis, shareholders in rural Nike County; John often said that as a child he had only seen two blondes. He went to local country schools, and later to private Pike County Vocational schools, where his studies were interrupted by the lack of access only to libraries for whites in Troy.
Troy State University (now the University of Troy) is also only for whites, and the All-Black Morehouse College where they were supposed to study was very expensive. He wrote a letter to Louis King, who saw the effort to unify the state of Troy, and put forward bus fares in Montgomery, Alabama. This meeting with King and Ralph Abernetti provoked Louis' lifelong commitment to nonviolent protest, but, on his advice, he attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where campus work was to take place. Helps to pay. His tuition. Eventually, he transferred and graduated in religion and philosophy from the nearby University of Fisak.
Louis' 1998 autobiography Walking with the Wind (written by Michael de Orso) was followed by the 2012 memoir, Across the Bridge (written by Brenda Jones). Co-authored with Andrew Aidin, he was a huge success with the best-selling graphic novel trilogy in March 2016, which became a standard learning tool for the civil rights movement.
Don Porter's recently released documentary John Lewis: There is a good deal of conflict between Louis's footage on the campaign trail for 1960 civil rights activism and the 2018 midterm elections. Emphasizing the need for a nonviolent fight against injustice and unstable institutions is a "major embarrassment", especially in relation to voter repression, a major issue for the 2020 election, especially in Georgia.
The question asked in 1996 against Bill Clinton's neoliberal welfare "reform" bill could express Louis' philosophy: "Where is the sense of decency?" What are the benefits of a great country winning the world and only losing its soul? “He lived to see Confederate monuments as the majority in the country as opposed to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement as a tribute to his fighting life after the assassination of George Floyd police.
His wife, Lillian Mills, whom he met at New Year's Eve and married in 1968, died in 2012. He had his son John-Miles.
John Robert Lewis, politician and civil rights leader, born 21 February 1940; Died 17 July 2020
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