The tributes Monday were the latest in a series of public remembrances for the 80-year-old Alabama native who helped lead the Student Nonviolent co-ordinating Committee during the peak of the civil rights era
The son of sharecroppers, Lewis was among the original Freedom Riders, a group of young activists who boarded commercial passenger buses and travelled through the segregated Jim Crow South. They were assaulted and battered at many stops along the way, by both citizens and authorities. Lewis was the youngest and last-living of the featured speakers for the March on Washington in 1963, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Lewis spoke of those critical months for the rest of his life as he championed voting rights as a foundation of democracy, and he returned to Selma many times for commemorations at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where baton-wielding officers had brutalized Lewis and the marchers.
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