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Lewis went on to become the Director of the Voter Education Project (VEP). After leaving SNCC in 1966, he continued his commitment to the Civil Rights Movement as Associate Director of the Field Foundation and his participation in the Southern Regional Council's voter registration programs. The marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers in a brutal confrontation that became known as "Bloody Sunday." News broadcasts and photographs revealing the senseless cruelty of the segregated South helped hasten the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.ĭespite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. They intended to march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate the need for voting rights in the state. Hosea Williams, another notable Civil Rights leader, and John Lewis led over 600 peaceful, orderly protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965. The following year, Lewis helped spearhead one of the most seminal moments of the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1964, John Lewis coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Lewis was dubbed one of the Big Six leaders of the Civil Rights Movement and at the age of 23, he was an architect of and a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. As Chairman, John Lewis became a nationally recognized leader. He was beaten severely by angry mobs and arrested by police for challenging the injustice of Jim Crow segregation in the South.įrom 1963 to 1966, Lewis was Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1961, he volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. JOHN LEWIS was Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District Representative and an American icon widely known for his role in the Civil Rights Movement.Īs a student at American Baptist Theological Seminary in 1959, John Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.