Civil rights icon John Lewis had a legacy of justice and determination

Washington – People paid great heed to John Lewis for much of his life in the civil rights movement. But at the very beginning — when he was just a kid wanting to be a minister someday — his audience wasn't so impressed.

A son of Alabama sharecroppers, the young Lewis first preached moral righteousness to his family's chickens. His place in the vanguard of the 1960s campaign for Black equality had its roots in that hardscrabble Alabama farm and that clucking audience.

Lewis, who died Friday of cancer at age 80, was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists who organized the 1963 March on Washington and spoke shortly before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech to a vast sea of people.

If that speech marked a turning point in the civil rights era, the struggle was far from over. Two more hard years passed before truncheon-wielding state troopers beat Lewis bloody and fractured his skull as he led 600 protesters over Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Searing TV images of that brutality helped to galvanize national opposition to racial oppression and embolden leaders in Washington to pass the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act five months later.

"The American public had already seen so much of this sort of thing, countless images of beatings and dogs and cursing and hoses," Lewis wrote in his memoirs. "But something about that day in Selma touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before."

That bridge became a touchstone in Lewis' life. He returned there often during his decades in Congress representing the Atlanta area, bringing lawmakers from both parties to see where "Bloody Sunday" went down.

Yet he declared, or at least dared to hope: "We're one people, we're one family. We all live in the same house, not just the American house but the world house."

Lewis earned bipartisan respect in Washington, where some called him the "conscience of Congress." But as a liberal on the losing side of many issues, he lacked the influence he'd summoned at the segregated lunch counters of his youth. He was a guiding voice for a young Illinois senator who became the first Black president.

"I told him that I stood on his shoulders," Barack Obama wrote. "When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made."

Lewis was a 23-year-old firebrand, a founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, when he joined King and four other civil rights leaders in New York to plan the Washington demonstration. At the National Mall months later, Lewis had a speaking slot before King and toned down his intended remarks, bowing to pressure that "incensed" him.

"I wanted it to have an air of militancy," Lewis said.

But still, it was a potent speech. "By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy," he vowed.

His words were soon and for all time overshadowed by King's speech. "He changed us forever," Lewis said.

But the change the movement sought would take many more sacrifices.

After months of training in nonviolent protest, demonstrators led by Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams began a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Alabama's capital in Montgomery. They didn't get far: On March 7, 1965, a phalanx of police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge. Authorities swung truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback, sending many to the hospital. The nation was horrified.

"This was a faceoff in the most vivid terms between a dignified, composed, completely nonviolent multitude of silent protesters and the truly malevolent force of a heavily armed, hateful battalion of troopers," Lewis wrote. "The sight of them rolling over us like human tanks was something that had never been seen before. People just couldn't believe this was happening, not in America."

Lewis was born on Feb. 21, 1940, outside Troy, Ala. He attended segregated public schools and was denied a library card because of his race, but he read books and newspapers avidly and could rattle off obscure historical facts even in his later years.

He was a teenager when he first heard King preach on the radio. They met after Lewis wrote him seeking support to become the first Black student at his local college. He ultimately attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Fisk University instead, in Nashville.

Soon, the young man King nicknamed "the boy from Troy" was organizing sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests while challenging segregation around the South.

President Jimmy Carter appointed Lewis to lead ACTION, a federal volunteer agency, in 1977. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council and then won a seat in Congress in 1986.

Humble and unfailingly friendly, Lewis was revered on Capitol Hill. When Democrats controlled the House, he tried to keep them unified as his party's senior deputy whip, a behind-the-scenes leadership post. The opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture was a key victory. But as one of the most liberal members of Congress, spending much of his career in the minority, he often lost policy battles, from his effort to stop the Iraq war to his defense of young immigrants.

After Obama's swearing-in, the president signed a commemorative photo: "Because of you, John. Barack Obama." Later, they marched hand in hand in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the attack.

Lewis said he'd been arrested 40 times in the 1960s, five more as a congressman. At 78, he told a rally he'd do it again to help reunite immigrant families separated by the Trump administration.