John Robert Lewis
John Lewis was born February 21, 1940 in Troy, Alabama. During Lewis' lifetime, he survived a tornado at the age of 4 with his 14 cousins, and he also had only seen 2 white people until the age of 6. Lewis was educated in at the Pike County Training High School in Brundidge, Alabama and was also educated in American Baptist Theological and at Fisk University which are both located in Nashville, Tennessee, where he then became a leader in the Nashville sit-ins.
Later, Lewis joined the Freedom Ride and became a national leader in the struggle for civil rights and respect for human dignity. In an interview, Lewis states: "I saw racial discrimination as a young child. I saw those signs that said 'White men, colored men, white women, colored women.' I remember as a young child with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins going down to the public library trying to get library cards, trying to check some books out, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors." One trip would change Lewis' mind forever, the trip he took as a child to Buffalo, NY, Lewis saw for the first time, black men and white men working together, there were unsegregated water fountains. As he saw this he began to believe the dream of equality was more than just a dream. Lewis strongly followed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks on the radio. By 1963, Lewis was recognized as one of the six leaders of the civil rights movement. In this year, Lewis was involved in the March on Washington during the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech "I have a Dream." In an interview with CNN during the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Ride, Lewis shares his experience: "It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious." In February of 2009, forty-eight years after the Klu Klux Klan had beaten Lewis during the civil rights marches, Lewis received an apology on national television from a white southerner, former Klansman Elwin Wilson. Apology video can be seen here |