John Lewis civil rights myth and member of the Georgian Congress for a long time

With unbearable sadness and enduring sorrow, we announce the death of American lawmaker John Lewis," his family said in a statement

John Lewis civil rights myth and member of the Georgian Congress for a long time

John Robert Lewis, son of farmers who survived brutal beating by the police during a historic rally in 1965 in Salma, Alabama, died to become a prominent figure in the civil rights movement and a member of the U.S. Congress for a long time, after a six-month battle with cancer. Was 80.

"With unbearable sadness and enduring sorrow, we announce the death of American lawmaker John Lewis," his family said in a statement. “He was honored and respected as the conscience of the American Congress and a symbol of American history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother. He was a strong hero in the ongoing struggle to demand respect for the dignity and value of every human being. He devoted his entire life to nonviolent activity and was an outright advocate in the struggle for equal justice in America.

Louis died on the same day that civil rights leader Pastor Cordy Tyndale "CT" was killed. Vivian, 95 years old. The double death of civil rights symbols comes at a time when the nation is still grappling with ethnic unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the ensuing black life protests that swept the country.

It is another sad thing in a year full of them, as America mourns the death of nearly 140,000 Americans of Covid-19 and fights for control of the virus. John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced his death in a statement.

California Democrat said, "Today, America mourns losing one of the greatest heroes of American history: Congressman John Lewis, Congressional Conscience."

Lewis had pledged to fight the disease after he announced in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which was discovered as a result of a routine medical visit and a subsequent test.

"I have been in a kind of fighting - for freedom, equality and basic human rights - almost my entire life," he said in a statement at the time. "I've never had a fight like the one I'm facing now." .

Lewis, a Democrat who has served as the US representative for the Fifth Congress in Georgia for more than three decades, has been widely seen as a moral conscience for Congress because of his embodiment of decades of peaceful struggle for civil rights. His emotional speeches were backed by a long record of actions that, according to his statistics, included more than 40 arrests while demonstrating against racial and social injustice.

A follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., who participated in counter-lunch sit-ins, joined Freedom Riders in the separate bus challenge - and at the age of 23 - he was a keynote speaker in Historic March 1963 in Washington. John Lewis Partnership

"Sometimes when I look back and think about it, how did we do what we did? 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 I felt when we were sitting in those lunch chairs, or we were going on a journey of freedom, or we were walking from Salma to Montgomery, there was strength and power. God Almighty was with us."

Lewis said that King inspired his activity. Angered by Jim Crow South's injustice, he launched what he called a "good problem" with organized protests and sit-ins. In the early 1960s, Fred Rider was challenging separation at interstate bus stops across the south and in the country's capital.

"We do not want our freedom gradually, we want to be free now," he said at the time.

At the age of 25, Lewis helped lead a march for voting rights on the Edmund Petos Bridge in Selma, where he and other demonstrators met by a heavily armed state and local police that attacked them with batons, which led to the breaking of Louis's skull. Pictures of "Bloody Sunday" shocked the nation and mobilized support for the Voting Rights Act 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson.

Years later, he said, "I was given a little blood on that bridge." "I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death."

Despite the assault and other beating, Louis never lost his energetic spirit, taking it from protests to politics. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981, and then to Congress six years later.

Once in Washington, focus on fighting poverty and helping younger generations by improving education and health care. He also co-wrote a series of graphic novels on the Civil Rights Movement, for which he won the National Book Award.

Louis was born on a cotton farm in Troy, Alabama, in isolated America on February 21, 1940, Lewis lived to see an elected African American president, a moment he said he had never thought of would come despite his long struggle for equality.

He described the attendance of President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 as an "out of body" experience.

When we were organizing voter registration campaigns, going on a journey of freedom, sitting down, coming to Washington for the first time, arresting them, imprisoning, and beating, I never thought - I hadn't dreamed - of the possibility of an African-American being ever elected President of the United States.

In 2011, more than 50 years after the front lines of the civil rights movement, Lewis received the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Freedom Medal, which placed him around the neck of his first black American president.

In a statement after Lewis' death, Obama said the civil rights icon "will continue, even with his departure, to serve as a beacon" on America's journey toward a more ideal union.

"He loved this country so much that he risked his life and blood to fulfill his promise. Over the decades, he not only surrendered himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but rather inspired the following generations to try to live up to his ideal."

Before Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017, Lewis said he did not consider him a "legitimate" president, an astonishing rebuke by an existing member of Congress toward a new president.

"I think the Russians participated in helping this man to be elected," Lewis said. "They helped destroy Hillary Clinton's candidacy."

Trump replied, describing Lewis as "all talk" and "no action" and said he should focus more on "reforming and helping" his region rather than "complaining" from Russia.

Lewis has bypassed Trump's inauguration.

Louis said in the spring of 2018. "I told the students, 'When you see something that is not right and not just and not only, you have a moral obligation to do something, to say something.'" He inspired us to do so. "

Lewis also believed in forgiveness.

He once described an incident when, as a young man, he was bloody beaten by the Ku Klux Klan members after trying to enter a "white waiting room".

"After many years, in February of 2009, one of the men who beat us came to my Capitol office - he was in his seventies, and his son was in his forties - and he said," Mr. Lewis, and Louis said "I am one of the people who beat you and your colleague in the seat "On a bus, he said, adding that the man said he was at KKK. He said, "I want to apologize. Do you accept my apology?"

Louis remembered after accepting his apology, hugging the father and son, and the three crying together.

"It's power in the path of peace, and the way of love," said Lewis. "We must never hate. The method of love is better."

This story was updated with additional developments on Saturday.