A Biography of John Lewis (1940-2020), Civil Rights Leader and Politician

FAIN: FT-278376-21

David Greenberg
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

Research for a biography of civil rights leader and politician John Lewis (1940-2020). 

John Lewis: A Life in Politics will be the first cradle-to-grave biography of the late Georgia congressman. Lewis was central to America’s fight for racial justice since 1960, when he and fellow Nashville students applied Gandhian ideas to integrate Jim Crow lunch counters. A founder and chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis led major campaigns from the Freedom Rides to the March on Washington to the Selma voting rights march. Ousted as SNCC chairman in 1966, Lewis entered politics, joining Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid, registering Blacks to vote in the 1970s, and in 1986 winning a seat in Congress, where he rose to be a deputy to the Speaker. Legislatively, he helped extend the Voting Rights Act, established a Black history museum in Washington, and served as “the conscience of Congress.” Lewis’s life story thus shows how the energies of the 1960s civil rights movement, in his person, carried on the drive for racial equality in the following decades.