John Lewis
Had his skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and spent 33 years in Congress making good trouble
John Lewis was born in 1940 outside Troy, Alabama, one of ten children of sharecroppers. As a boy he preached to the chickens he was supposed to be feeding, and he later said they listened better than some congregations. At 17 he wrote to Martin Luther King, who sent him a bus ticket to Montgomery.
At college in Nashville he was trained in nonviolence by James Lawson and in 1960 helped lead sit-ins at lunch counters, where he was punched, burned with cigarettes and jailed. In 1961 he joined the first Freedom Ride and was beaten at Rock Hill, South Carolina, and again in Montgomery. He became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963 and, at 23, was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington, where older leaders made him soften his speech.
On 7 March 1965 he led about 600 marchers out of Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. State troopers charged them with clubs and tear gas and fractured his skull. Film of the attack was on television that night, and the Voting Rights Act became law five months later.
He lost the leadership of SNCC in 1966 to those who thought nonviolence had run its course. He was elected to Congress from Atlanta in 1986 and served until his death in 2020, still getting arrested at protests. In 2009 a former Klansman who had beaten him in 1961 came to his office to apologise, and Lewis forgave him.