"It's very, very touching to see thousands of people from the United States and around the world take to the streets - expressing boldly, and speaking out, and getting what I'm calling 'good trouble'," Lewis said in an interview with CBS' "This Morning" program in June.

In 2018, he wrote on Twitter :

Don’t get lost in the ocean of despair. Be hopeful and optimistic. We are not only struggling for one day, one week, one month, one year, but we are struggling for life. Never be afraid of creating noise and causing good trouble, necessary trouble. "

The scene of Lewis being beaten shocked the whole country and prompted the rapid passage of the 1965 Suffrage Act. He was later called "Congressional Conscience."

U.S. Congressman John Lewis died Friday at the age of 80. He was the son of a sharecropper and an advocate of nonviolence. He shed blood and sacrificed in the historic struggle for racial equality in Alabama Selma and the southern states that implemented the Jim Crow Act, and then served as a moral authority in Congress.

Note: The Jim Crow Act generally refers to 1876-1 In 965, the southern U.S. states and border states imposed apartheid laws on people of color (mostly targeting African Americans but also including other ethnic groups).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed his death in a statement.

htmlOn December 29, the Democrat from Georgia announced that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer and vowed to fight cancer with the same enthusiasm as fighting racial inequality. He said: "I have been fighting almost my whole life - fighting for freedom, equality, and basic human rights." "

On the front line of the bloody struggle in the abolition of the Jim Crow Act movement, Lewis was attacked and his skull was fractured. Lewis was a heroic backbone of the civil rights movement and was also the only speaker in the 1963 "For Work and Freedom: Marching towards Washington ".

Note: The "March to Washington" parade is also known as the Washington Parade, referring to 1 On August 28, 963, 250,000 people (a quarter of them white) gathered on the national lawn in downtown Washington, calling for an end to all forms of discrimination and allow African Americans to enjoy the same civil and economic rights as whites. During the rally, Martin Luther King delivered a famous speech "I Have a Dream" aimed at promoting racial harmony in front of Lincoln Memorial Hall .

More than half a century later, after the killing of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, was in May, Lewis welcomed the global demonstrations triggered against police killing black men and more broadly against systemic racism in many parts of society. He saw these protests as a continuation of his lifelong career, although the disease left him alone as a bystander.

Lewis in 6 "It's very, very touching to see thousands of people from the United States and around the world take to the streets - boldly expressing, shouting, and getting what I call 'good trouble'," Month said of the Black Lives Matter movement that promotes anti-racist demonstrations. "This movement gives people a different feeling and performance, it's so large and more inclusive." He also said, "There won't be a step back." "

He died on the same day with another staunch civil rights fighter, Rev. C. T. Vivien. Vivien was a close friend of Pastor Martin Luther King.

Lewis' personal experience is parallel to the civil rights movement. He was one of the 13 "free riders" who, in 1961, challenged segregation policies on southern interstate travel. He was the founder and early leader of the "Coordination Committee for Student Nonviolence," the organization Responsible for organizing and coordinating sit-ins at the lunch counter. He helped organize the "March to Washington" parade, where Martin Luther King was the main spokesperson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Note: Free riders refer to the interstate bus that American civil rights activists took an interstate bus to the severely segregated southern United States from 1961 to test the implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court verdict in Boynton v. Virginia and Erin Morgan v. Virginia.The Supreme Court ruled in Boynton, allowing interstate travelers to ignore local segregation policies. After the Boynton case, segregation in hotels and interstate bus stops was no longer legal. And five years before the Boynton verdict, the Interstate Commerce Commission had announced the repeal of the “quarantine but equal” act in the interstate buses established in the Sarah Kees v. Carolina Coach Company. But the Interstate Commerce Commission did not implement its ruling, so the Jim Crow law is still in effect throughout the southern United States.

As early as 1960, young people and students in the South began to participate in large-scale sit-ins protests, opposing the division of black and white areas in light restaurants and boycott retailers who still maintain apartheid policies. Free riding will then begin. On May 4, 1961, the first free riders set off from Washington and planned to arrive in New Orleans on May 17. The Congress on Racial Equality funded most of the subsequent free rides, and some of the free rides were organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee. Free riders take a variety of public transport. Their approach to challenge the segregation in the south has sparked a strong response and has had a positive impact on the American civil rights movement. Because of them, the South's disregard for federal laws and the local atrocities related to apartheid have attracted national attention. Local police arrested these protesters on charges such as "uninvasion", "illegal assembly", and "violation of the apartheid law". In some areas, police cooperate with the Ku Klux Klan and other white opponents and often allow white violent gangs to attack demonstrators without interfering. (The above information comes from Wikipedia)

Lewis led demonstrations against apartheid in bathrooms, hotels, restaurants, parks and swimming pools, and he also rose up to resist other insulting policies that label blacks as second-class citizens. Almost every time he went to, he was beaten, spitted or scalded by cigarette butts. He was tortured by white thugs and beaten by law enforcement officers.

On March 7, 1965, he led the most famous parade in American history. Lewis, who led 600 people to seek the right to deprived vote, marched on the Edmund Petters Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and met Alabama State Police on standby in riot gear.

protesters were asked to disband, but they stood silently. State troopers responded with tear gas, thick whips and rubber tubes wrapped with barbed wire. In this melee that later known as "Bloody Sunday," a state policeman smashed Lewis's skull with a stick, knocked him to the ground, and then continued to hit him as he tried to stand up.

John Lewis (the one who kneels in front of the ground), was beaten by state police during a suffrage parade in Selma, Alabama.

TV images of Lewis and dozens of others being beaten up angered the American people and inspired support for the Suffrage Act. Eight days later, then-President's Lyndon Johnson submitted the bill to a joint meeting of Congress and signed into law on August 6. As a milestone in the civil rights struggle, the bill repeals the literacy test that blacks must undergo before registering for a vote and replaces apartheid voting registrar with federal registrar to ensure that blacks are no longer deprived of their voting rights. After

registration, millions of African Americans began to change politics throughout the South. In the 1976 presidential election, they gave Georgia son Jimmy Carter (note: Carter was born in a small town in southern Georgia) a narrow advantage. (A very popular poster reads: "The hand that once picked cotton can now elect president.")

Black voting rights open the door for black people, including Lewis, to run for office. He was elected as a member of Congress in 1986, the second African-American man in Georgia to be elected to Congress since the Reconstruction Period (Note: refers to the general term for the transformation and rebuilding of the socio-political, economic and social life in the southern part of the Civil War from 1863 to 1877). His constituency covers most of Atlanta.

fought side by side with Martin Luther King, and was arrested 40 times in 6 years and was repeatedly beaten

Although Lewis represented Atlanta, his inherent supporters were vulnerable people everywhere. Rather than saying that he supports major legislation, he persists in pursuing justice, which he is called "the conscience of Congress" by his colleagues.

When the House voted to impeach President Trump in December 2019, Lewis' remarks were high-level. "When you see something incorrect, not just something unfair, you have a moral obligation to speak out and act. Our children and other people's children will ask us, 'What did you do? What did you say?' For some, this vote may be tough. But our mission and mission is to stand on the right side of history."

Lewis's words resonated after seeing a Minneapolis policeman kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than 8 minutes and causing him to breathe.

In an interview with CBS's "This Morning" program, he said: "This video is so painful, I'm crying. People now understand the full meaning of this struggle. This is another step on the long road to freedom and justice for all mankind."

Lewis (third from left) and Martin Luther King (right) march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Photographed on March 21, 1961.

When he was young, his words might be more radical. History is forever remembered by Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but Lewis surprised and excited the people present with his passion.

He said to the cheering crowd during that parade: "By our appeals, our determination and the power of our numbers, we will split the segregated South into pieces and regroup them in the image of God and democracy. We must say, 'Wake up, America. Wake up!' Because we can't stop, can't, and can't endure it anymore."

His original text is more straightforward. He wrote at the time: "We will march across the south, like the states and the people of the southern United States and the Yankee Yankee in the northern United States," he wrote.

"John Kennedy President's Civil Rights Act "too little, too late," he wrote sternly, "Which side of the federal government is on?"

However, Martin Luther King and some other elderly people (Lewis was only 23 years old at the time) were worried that the passages in the first draft would offend the Kennedy administration, and they felt that they could not alienate the government in the process of pushing the federal government to take action on civil rights. They told Lewis to speak to be low-key.

Nevertheless, the marching people, estimated to have more than 200,000 people on the same day, praised every word he said.

Lewis was a serious person , a civil rights activist who is not as eloquent as other civil rights speakers, but he is aggressive, tenacious, and wholehearted, and his leadership is impressive.

1, after being attacked by apartheids, Lewis and another Free Knight, James Tsvog.

He became famous for having an almost mysterious belief in his ability to survive. A civil rights activist who knew him well told the New York Times 3 in 1976: "Some leaders, even the toughest leaders, occasionally acted in knowing that they would be beaten or imprisoned. John never did this. He always put his all in the battle. ”

Lewis was arrested 40 times between 1960 and 1966. He was repeatedly beaten unconscious by Southern police and villains. During the "Free Ride" in 1961, he and others were attacked by hundreds of white men outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Alabama, and fell unconscious in his blood.He spent countless days and nights in the county jail and 31 days in Mississippi's notorious Patchman prison. As soon as

entered Congress, Lewis was in line with the most open Democrats, but he also showed an independent personality. In his search for what Martin Luther King calls a “beloved community”—a world without poverty, racism and war (which Lewis followed)—he often voted against military spending.

He opposed the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1992. He refused to participate in the 1995 "March of Million People" in Washington, saying that the speech by Louis Farahan, the organizer of the event and leader of the "Islamic National Organization" (Note: a religious movement that mixes Islam and black nationalism, is "divisible and paranoid."

In 2001, Lewis did not attend Bush Jr.'s inauguration ceremony. He said he believes that George W. Bush, who became president after the Supreme Court stopped the recount of Florida , was not really elected.

In 2017, he boycotted the inauguration of Trump and questioned the legitimacy of his presidency.

This move caused him to be ridiculed by Trump on Twitter: "Mr. John Lewis should spend more time repairing and helping his constituency, which is in a bad state and fall apart (not to mention crime is rampant), rather than slandering the election results. He kept talking nonstop, and there was no result in no action. Sad!"

Trump's attack marked a sharp turn for the worse than the respect given to Lewis by previous presidents (including the previous president Barack Obama ). In 2011, Obama awarded Lewis the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that American citizens can receive.

11 111 in 2015, Obama and Lewis were in Selma, Alabama, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the passage of the 1965 Suffrage Act.

Obama awarded Lewis this honor at a ceremony held at the White House . "For generations from now on, when parents teach their children what courage is, John Lewis' story will come to their minds - he is an American who knows he can't wait for others, or chooses another time to make a change; his life is a lesson about a fierce and urgent present."

For his family, he is a "priest"

John Robert Lewis grew up in the humiliation of segregation in rural Alabama. He was born on February 21, 1940 on a white-owned sharecropper farm near the town of Troy, the third of ten children. After John's parents bought their own 110-acre farm for $300, John also took on the farm work and dropped out of school during the harvest season to pick cotton, peanuts and corn. Their houses have no water pipes and no electricity. In the toilet, they use the old directory pages of Sears' department store as toilet paper.

John is responsible for watching the chicken. He feeds them and reads " Bible " to them. He baptized the chickens when they were born and held a carefully prepared funeral after their death.

In his memoir "Walking with the Wind", published in 1998, he wrote: "I really want to save the souls of these little birds. I can imagine that they are my congregation. And I, a pastor."

His family called him a "priest", and becoming a pastor seemed to be his fate. He got inspiration from the radio when he heard a speech from a young pastor named Martin Luther King and read stories about Montgomery's boycott of the bus from 1955 to 1956. Finally, he wrote a letter to Martin Luther King, who sent him a roundtrip bus ticket to visit him in Montgomery in 1958.

By then, Lewis had already started studying at the American Baptist Seminary (now American Baptist Academy) in Nashville , where he worked as a dishwasher and gatekeeper in order to pay for the tuition.

In Nashville, Lewis met with many civil rights activists who planned lunch counter sit-ins, free rides and voter registration campaigns. Among these are Pastor James Lawson Jr., one of the most famous nonviolent rebellious scholars in the United States who have hosted workshops on Gandhi and the nonviolent movement. He coached a generation of civil rights organizers, including Lewis.

960 Lewis (right) stood inside the door of a restaurant while sitting in protest, protesting that the restaurant refused to serve black people.

Lewis was first arrested in February 1960, when he and other students asked for services at the white lunch counter in Nashville. This is the first protracted war in the movement that led to the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee.

David Haberstein, who was then a reporter for the Tennessee in Nashville, later described the scene at that time: "The protests had shown extraordinary solemnity, and an image gradually highlighted - elegant and polite young black people, with Gandhi's principles and seeking the most basic rights. But they were attacked by young white thugs, and sometimes burned their bodies with cigarettes. ."

Three months later, after many public sit-ins, Nashville's political and commercial groups surrendered in the face of pressure, so the city became the first major southern city to begin abolishing the apartheid policy in public places.

But Lewis lost his family's favor. He wrote that when his parents learned that he was arrested in Nashville, they felt ashamed. When he was a child, his parents taught him to accept the world he saw. When Lewis asked them about the sign marked "People of color only", they told him: "That's it, don't get into trouble."

But he said that as an adult, he met Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks , who refused to give up their seats to a white man, becoming the fuse of the civil rights movement. He was inspired, "To cause trouble, to cause good trouble, necessary trouble."

"To cause trouble" became his life motto. The documentary John Lewis: What a Trouble is released this month.

In 1979, Lewis said in an interview with oral history at Washington University in St. Louis that despite the shame he brought to his family, he felt that he had "participated in a jihad" and that his arrest was "a symbol of honor."

In 1961, when he graduated from seminary, he participated in a free journey organized by the "Race Equality Conference" (Note: American Civil Rights Organization, a nonviolent way to combat corruption and segregation, or CORE). He and the others were beaten to the head and blood as they tried to enter the white waiting room at Rock Hill Bus Station in South Carolina. Later, he was put in jail in Birmingham, Alabama. He was beaten again in Montgomery, with several others seriously injured, and one of them was paralyzed for life.

He wrote in his memoir: "If I learned anything from that long and bloody bus trip in 1961, it is: we had a long and bloody battle in the southern United States. And I was going to be in it."

At the same time, a division began to emerge between those who wanted to express their anger and through resistance, and those who believed in pressure in a nonviolent way. Lewis chose nonviolence.

6 June 1967 Lewis. He later said that he had "participated in a jihad" and that his arrest was "a symbol of honor."

continued to fight after entering Congress, encouraging young people not to be afraid of getting into "good trouble"

But by the time of urban racial riots in the 1960s, especially in the Watts area of ​​Los Angeles in 1965, many black people had rejected nonviolence and tended to fight directly. Lewis was kicked off as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee in 1966, replaced by the hot-tempered Stokeley Carmichael who made the term “black power” popular.

Lewis has been silent for several years. He led the Voter Education Program, responsible for voter registration, and received his Bachelor of Degree in Religion and Philosophy from the University of Fisk in Nashville in 1967.

During this time, he met Lillian Myers, a librarian, teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer. She is extroverted and keen on politics and can quote Martin Luther King's speech word for word. They got married in 1968 and she became one of Lewis’ closest political consultants.

Note: Peace Corps is a volunteer organization supported and operated by the U.S. government. Its official purpose is to help communities around the world solve local needs through volunteer services and promote mutual understanding between the country and the United States.

She died in 2012. Lewis's survivors include several of his siblings and his son John Myers Lewis.

Lewis' first attempt at running for office was in 1977, when he ran for Congress without success. In 1981, he won a seat in Atlanta City Council and in 1986, he ran again for the House of Representatives. It was a fierce competition, with two civil rights figures, Lewis and Julian Bond. Julian Bond was a friend of Lewis and his close partner in the civil rights movement before. It is generally believed that the charming Bond is the most popular candidate, he is better at expressing and more elegant and confident than Lewis.

Lewis said in a debate: "I hope you think about sending Washington a horse that can carry a heavy load, not a horse that can be used for the draft. I hope you think about sending a tug, not a cruise ship."

Lewis unexpectedly won 52% of the vote. His supporters come from the white constituencies in Atlanta, as well as working-class and poor black voters who prefer to be with him rather than Bond, even though Bond won most of the black voters.

Without surprise, Lewis' long congressional career was full of protests. He has been arrested several times in Washington, including protesting against apartheid outside the South African embassy and protesting against genocide in the Darfur region at the Sudan embassy.

In 2010, he supported Obama's health care bill, a divided policy that attracted angry protesters, many of whom came from the right-wing Tea Party. Some protesters swear and racially insulted Lewis and other members of the Black Caucus in Congress.

"They yelled, a little harassing," Lewis told reporters at the time, "but it's okay. I've encountered this before."

In June 2016, Lewis and other members of Congress sat in the House of Representatives, demanding that the Republican-led House vote on the gun control bill.

In 2016, after a massacre in an Orlando nightclub in Florida, killing 49 people, he took the lead in sit-in in the House of Representatives to protest the federal government's inaction on gun control. The demonstration was supported by 170 lawmakers, but Republicans viewed it as a publicity stunt and suppressed legislative action.

has gone through all this, and the "Bloody Sunday" incident has been lingering in Lewis' mind. Every year on the anniversary of the event, Lewis goes to the Selma. Over time, he observed that people's attitudes changed. During the commemoration in 1998, Joseph Smithman gave Lewis a "City Key" (Note: "City Key" represents respect and thanks to those who have made important contributions to the community).

Smithurman was the mayor of the city of Selma in 1965 and was an apartheid; he still serves as mayor of the city, but he has expressed his condolences to his position back then.

Smith Thurman commented on Lewis this way: " Back then, I called him an outside instigator; today, I called him one of the bravest people I have ever met."

Lewis was a very popular speaker at the college graduation ceremony. He always made the same suggestions - to get graduates into "good trouble", just like he did against his parents' wishes back then.

017 Lewis

018, he wrote on Twitter:

Don’t get lost in the ocean of despair. Be hopeful and optimistic. We are not only struggling for one day, one week, one month, one year, but we are struggling for life.Never be afraid of creating noise and causing good trouble, necessary trouble. ”