#ripjohnlewis

Rep. John Lewis talking with a Somali child during Operation Restore Hope, 1993 (NARA ID 6508426); President Barack Obama embracing Rep. John Lewis, 3/7/2015 (NARA ID 157649496); Photo of the two-minute warning on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. (NARA ID 16899041); John Lewis with President Obama and others at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma March (NARA ID 157649500)

We Remember Civil Rights Legend John Lewis 

There is perhaps no single figure whose own life and career embodies the promise, success, and continued challenges of civil rights for Black Americans than John Lewis. We mourn this tremendous loss and look back on his incredible history through our holdings dating back to the early 1960s, including the March on Washington and the “Bloody Sunday” Selma March.

Hear Rep. Lewis describe his meeting with JFK before the March on Washington (from his Oral History for the JFK Library).

It was in this meeting...  somehow out of the blue A. Philip Randolph says something like, “Mr. President, the black masses are restless,” in his baritone voice. “The black masses are restless, and we’re going to march on Washington.” And you could tell by the body language of President Kennedy, he just sort of moved and twisted and turned in his chair, he didn’t necessarily like what he heard. And he said, “Mr. Randolph, if you bring a lot of people to Washington, won’t there be a crisis, disorder, chaos? And we would never be able to get a civil rights bill through the Congress.” And Mr. Randolph responded and said, “Mr. President, this will be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest.” And President Kennedy sort of said, “Well, I think we’re going to have problems. But we all have problems, and we can solve those problems.”

See John Lewis in The March (film of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, restored by the National Archives Motion Picture Preservation Lab). At 23 he was the youngest speaker that day and was the last remaining living speaker.

See also:

FBI Case File #44-28492: Bloody Sunday, Rediscovering Black History blog post by archivist Dr. Tina Ligon

Selma, Edmund Pettus Bridge FBI Case File, Rediscovering Black History blog post by archives specialist Netisha Currie

Testimony of John Lewis in Court Case resulting from 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama

Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero introduces Rep. John Lewis at National Archives event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington

Video:  John Lewis on Rights and Justice in America

John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020)

After years of putting his body and his freedom on the line as an activist, he spent more than three decades in Congress.

John Lewis, who went from being the youngest leader of the 1963 March on Washington to a long-serving congressman from Georgia and icon of the civil rights movement, died Friday. He was 80.

As a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was a committed participant in some of the key moments of the movement — an original Freedom Rider in 1961, a principal speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, one of those brutally clubbed during a 1965 march in Selma, Alabama. Through it all, he faced taunts, beatings and dozens of arrests.

By his middle years, he was in Congress and sometimes referred to it as its “conscience.”

Lewis died on the same day as civil rights leader the Rev. Cordy Tindell "C.T." Vivian, who was 95.