33 year Representative from Georgia and civil rights icon, John Lewis lost his battle with pancreatic cancer yesterday. He was 80.
Lewis, the son of Alabama sharecroppers, was already a national figure when he first entered Congress in 1987.
He was one of the keynote speakers at the March on Washington in 1963 and the only one who lived long enough to witness President Barack Obama’s election.
“When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought — I never dreamed — of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected President of the United States,” Lewis said shortly before Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
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“He was honored and respected as the conscience of the U.S. Congress and an icon of American history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother,” his family said in a statement. “He was a stalwart champion in the ongoing struggle to demand respect for the dignity and worth of every human being. He dedicated his entire life to nonviolent activism and was an outspoken advocate in the struggle for equal justice in America. He will be deeply missed.”