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John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Democratic congressman, died on Friday. Martin Luther King's former traveling companion was 80 years old.
Friday evening July 17, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, confirmed the death of John Lewis. Nonviolence and civil rights activist in the United States suffered from pancreatic cancer. Barack Obama, the former US president, said that John Lewis "loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that he could keep his promise ".
Born in Alabama in 1940, John Lewis became a prominent leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He joined the Freedom Rides who started in 1961, traveling by bus south to fight segregation. Founding member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which he became president in 1963, he helped organize the Washington March for Jobs and Freedom, when Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech "I have a dream".
In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, as activists attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, John Lewis led the way. He was thrown to the ground and beaten by the police, his skull was fractured. National television footage of this brutality had drawn attention to racial oppression in the south. President Lyndon B Johnson then pressured Congress to pass the voting rights law.
In 1987 John Lewis was elected in Georgia's Fifth District and held the office until his death. He announced his stage four pancreatic cancer last December. "I have waged a kind of struggle – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for most of my life. I have never faced a fight like the one I am currently fighting.", he had declared.
He was the youngest and last surviving civil rights activist from the "Big Six", a group led by Martin Luther King.
Former American presidents Barack Obama, of whom he was one of the heroes, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Democratic candidate Joe Biden and Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, paid tribute to him. Nancy Pelosi ordered that the US flags from the Capitol be hoisted half-stick. She said: "Every day of John Lewis's life was dedicated to bringing freedom and justice to all. As he said 57 years ago during the March on Washington, standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial: 'Our minds, souls and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice do. don't exist for everyone. "