






John Robert Lewis (1940–2020) was a civil-rights organizer, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair, Freedom Rider, and U.S. representative from Georgia. AP and NPR report that he died on July 17, 2020, age 80, after pancreatic cancer, and that his 1965 beating by Alabama state troopers helped galvanize opposition to segregation. Britannica identifies him as a Big Six civil-rights leader who led the Selma march that became Bloody Sunday and later served in Congress. The National Archives records that Lewis suffered a skull fracture on the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the voting-rights march. His worth was disciplined witness: after the bridge nearly broke him, he kept crossing back through law, memory, protest, funerals, classrooms, anniversaries, and votes, teaching that good trouble is democracy’s maintenance work, not a slogan for comfortable days, and never finished by one generation.






