July 17, 2025.

Five years ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 80.

Lewis was a troublemaker as a young adult, breaking the laws of his state. He broke the

laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of

the 13 original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington,

D.C. to New Orleans to challenge segregation.

It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station

in Montgomery unconscious, Lewis later recalled. An adherent of the philosophy of nonviolence,

Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 45 times.

As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, he helped to organize the

1963 March on Washington, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told more than 200,000 people

gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial

that he had a dream. Just 23 years old, Lewis spoke at the event. Two years later, as Lewis and

600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the

Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma,

mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured

Lewis's skull. To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the law-breaking

protesters who were disrupting

the peace of the South. But what seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were in fact

changing minds. Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson honored those

changing ideas when he went on TV to support

the marchers and call for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill.

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