John Lewis: A Civil Rights Legend Who Saw Humanity in His Oppressors

John Lewis, the great civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, died of pancreatic cancer on July 17, 2020, but he never left the headlines. His name and spirit stayed front and center throughout this year’s presidential campaign. At the Democratic National Convention in August, speaker after speaker paid tribute to Lewis and his legacy. During the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote drive, Lewis’ insistence on the importance of voting, especially for Black Americans, echoed through the party’s messaging. Just after Election Day, the hand of karma was discerned when the mail-in ballots of Georgia’s Clayton County — which mostly falls within Lewis’ old district — propelled Joe Biden into the lead in the state vote count, a position he never surrendered.

Making sure all Americans could vote was the cause for which John Lewis labored longest and hardest all his life. The beatings he endured from state troopers while marching in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 served to help get the Voting Rights Act passed. In the 1970s, in an interlude between his activism and office-holding, Lewis ran the Voter Education Project, crisscrossing the South to register Black voters for the first time. When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, winning most of the South on the strength of African American ballots, Lewis could take some credit. “Hands that once picked cotton now can pick a president,” he took to saying.