“I wish Dr. King was here.”
That was the thought going through the mind of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., while waiting to receive his Medal of Freedom from President Obama in the East Room of the White House. Lewis, spoke to reporters in the White House Briefing Room still wearing his medal with a cobalt blue ribbon. He humbly described the day.
“It’s a special honor,” Lewis said. “I feel more than lucky; very blessed to receive this medal this honor from the first African American president.” The Medal of Freedom is America’s highest civilian honor. The Georgia congressman said in his mind, he accepted the medals of countless individuals who were also a part of the Civil Rights Movement.
“Those that started on the journey. Those that were beaten, arrested and jailed. Those that died along the way that are not here,” he said. The representative from Georgia, also recalled a previous trip to the White House. Lewis, recounted the day in 1963 he visited President John Kennedy with Dr. King.
Source- Fox News
Born in Troy, Alabama, the third son of Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis. Lewis was educated at the Pike County Training High School, Brundidge, Alabama and also American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local sit-in movement. He participated in the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the struggle for civil rights.[1]
[edit] SNCC
Lewis was instrumental in organizing student sit-ins, bus boycotts and non-violent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality. He endured brutal beatings by angry mobs and suffered a fractured skull at the hands of Alabama State police as he led a march of 600 people in Selma, Ala. in 1965.[2][3]
Lewis became nationally known during his prominent role in the Selma to Montgomery marches. During the first march police attacked the peaceful demonstrators and beat Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963, Lewis, a representative of [SNCC], the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the youngest speaker.[4]
Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, was prepared to ask the right question: ‘Which side is the federal government on?’ That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence.”[5]
Lewis (far right) with Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young, William Fitts Ryan, and James L. Farmer, Jr.
“John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a ‘cooling-off period,’ a moratorium on Freedom Rides.[5] Lewis had been imprisoned for forty days in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Sunflower County, Mississippi after participating in a Freedom Riders activity in that state.[6]
Lewis at meeting of American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1964
In February 2009, forty-eight years after he had been bloodied by the Ku Klux Klan during civil rights marches, Lewis received an apology on national television from a white southerner, former Klansman Elwin Wilson.[7][8]
Mississippi State Penitentiary, where Lewis, as a Freedom Rider, had been imprisoned
“I’m so sorry about what happened back then,” Wilson said breathlessly. “It’s OK. I forgive you,” Lewis responded. (On national television, both men recalled the incident.) “[I remember] going directly to the Greyhound bus station,” Lewis said. “We tried to enter a so-called ‘white’ waiting room and the moment we started through the door, a group of young men attacked us.” Wilson was in the group, but said he “did more than help.” He said he was the main attacker. The outburst, Wilson said, was just part of a life of hate he led for years. “I had a black baby doll in this house, and I had a little rope, and I tied it to a limb and let it hang here,” he said.[7][8]
After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis worked with community organizations and was named community affairs director for the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.
[edit] Early political career
Lewis first ran for elective office in 1977, when a vacancy occurred in Georgia’s 5th District. A special election was called after President Jimmy Carter appointed incumbent Congressman Andrew Young to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Lewis lost the race to Atlanta City Councilman and future Senator Wyche Fowler.
After his unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1977, Lewis was without a job and in debt from his campaign. He accepted a position with the Carter administration as associate director of ACTION, responsible for running the VISTA program, the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, and the Foster Grandparent Program. He held that job for two and a half years, resigning as the 1980 election approached.[9] In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council.
He joined the US House of Representatives in the 1986 election, representing Georgia’s 5th congressional district, and has held that position continuously ever since.
