Firebrand civil rights leader John Lewis from 1960s America passes away

John Lewis, the civil rights warrior who marched with Martin Luther King Jr and was nearly killed in police beatings before serving for decades as an American congressman, died on Friday.

Lewis, a Congressman from Atlanta who had announced in December that he had advanced pancreatic cancer, was 80.

The African-American icon spent his life getting into what he liked to call “good trouble” - the confrontations necessary to improve US democracy by racial injustice.

“John Lewis was a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation - from the determination with which he met discrimination at lunch counters and on Freedom Rides, to the courage he showed as a young man facing down violence and death on Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the 17-term congressman from Georgia.

The son of sharecroppers, Lewis was just 21 when he became a founding member of Freedom Riders, who fought segregation in the US transportation system in the early 1960s. He was the youngest leader of the 1963 March in Washington, DC in which King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

Lewis entered Congress in 1986 and became a figure of moral authority.

Lewis kept up the fight for civil rights until the end of his life. He made his last public appearance in June, as protests for racial justice swept the United States and the world.

He stepped away from his congressional duties in recent months for undergoing cancer treatment.

“Our conscience, he was a griot of this modern age, one who saw its hatred but fought ever towards the light,” said Stacey Abrams, a Democratic activist and founder of Fair Fight, a voting rights group in Lewis’ home state of Georgia.