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John Lewis’s Example Spurred Black Activists to Seek Office

  • Passing of generational torch from Civil Rights era to BLM
  • Over 17 terms, Lewis turned activism into legislative action
Barack Obama walks with John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015. 

Barack Obama walks with John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015. 

Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

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Five years ago, President Barack Obama clasped the left hand of Representative John Lewis and walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in remembrance of a bloody civil rights battle the congressman had waged five decades before.

Lewis told Obama about the state troopers who assaulted him and other non-violent protesters on that same bridge in 1965 as they called for expanded voting rights for Black citizens. Obama said men like Lewis helped create a more “just America.”