Sikat na congressman pumanaw na

Madami ang nagulat at nalungkot sa pagkamatay ng isang sikat na congressman. John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Democratic congressman, has died. He was 80. John Lewis obituary. On Friday night, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, confirmed Lewis’s death. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer. Barack Obama, the first African American president, said Lewis “loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise”. Lewis campaigned for civil rights to the very end of his life. Obama said it was “fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was at a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who were helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death”. Born to sharecroppers in Troy, Alabama, in February 1940, Lewis became a prominent leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He joined the Freedom Rides that began in 1961, traveling to the south by bus to fight segregation on interstate buses. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he became its chair in 1963 and helped organise the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I have a dream” speech. In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, as activists tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, Lewis was walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his overcoat when he was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. His skull was fractured. Nationally televised images of the brutality forced attention on racial oppression in the south. That incident, along with other beatings during peaceful protests, left Lewis with scars for the rest of his life. Within days, King led more marches in Alabama. President Lyndon B Johnson soon was pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which became law later that year. Lewis was elected in Georgia’s fifth district in 1987 and held the office until his death. He announced his stage four pancreatic cancer in December last year. “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life,” he said. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.” The youngest and last survivor of the “Big Six” civil rights activists, a group led by King, when Lewis attended Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 he was the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington. Obama presented him with a commemorative photograph signed, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.” In 2011 he awarded Lewis the presidential medal of freedom.

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