Known as the “conscience of Congress,” John Lewis was a civil rights activist and Congressman who served as the representative of Georgia’s 5th district (which includes most of Atlanta) from 1987 until he died in 2020. Born to Alabama sharecroppers in 1940, he grew up dreaming of being a preacher, but he also closely followed the civil rights movement, meeting both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. while still a teenager. As a student at the historically black American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, Tennessee, Lewis joined the student movement seeking to desegregate downtown lunch counters, echoing the famous “sit-in” campaign months earlier in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lewis’s efforts with the Nashville student movement led to his co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an umbrella of student movements challenging segregation throughout the Jim Crow South.

With the SNCC, Lewis participated in nearly every major civil rights campaign of the early 1960s, beginning as one of the original “Freedom Riders” traveling through the Deep South to challenge segregation on buses and bus terminals. After being elected chairman of SNCC in 1963, he was one of the “Big Six” leaders of civil rights organizations leading the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.