We Have Lost "The Conscience of Congress": John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020)
“The life of the US congressman John Lewis, who has died aged 80 after suffering from pancreatic cancer, is a paradigm for the history of race relations in the US over those eight decades. Born into segregation, Lewis took a leadership role in civil rights protest as a young man, and was at the heart of many of the most crucial, and dangerous, events in that movement. He was beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and by the police, jailed repeatedly, and continually forced to move forward while ignoring friendly voices warning him not to push too hard against the apartheid legislated in large parts of America.
“As the changes for which he battled came into being, he found himself elected to the US House of Representatives, where he served in leadership positions, and was called ‘the conscience of Congress’ by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And while he saw a black man elected president, he then watched as many of his movement’s hard-fought gains were walked back by reactionary judges, senators and, indeed, a president.
“A leader of the Nashville Student Movement, Lewis was arrested multiple times while organising sit-ins against the city’s segregated restaurants and bus services. In 1960, along with a similar student group in Greensboro, North Carolina, he and Nashville colleagues Diane Nash and Marion Barry (a future mayor of Washington) were at the heart of the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced CONTINUE READING: glen brown: We Have Lost "The Conscience of Congress": John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020)