With the passing of John Lewis on July 17, the nation and the world lost more than a civil rights icon. John Lewis was also a legendary Human Being. Congressman Lewis was an advocate, a fighter for the rights of the disenfranchised.
A protégé of Martin Luther King, Jr, John Lewis was the last surviving speaker at the watershed March on Washington in 1963. John Lewis was present when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act two years later.
With all that is going on in the wake of George Floyd’s murder it may be difficult to see the changes that have taken place since “Bloody Sunday.” The country was witness to that change as the Alabama State Troopers saluted the Congressman's funeral caisson as it crossed the bridge, named for a confederate general and grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, where he was nearly beaten to death by their predecessors. Even more poignant was the image of a white trooper named Bubba (seriously) lifting a little black girl onto his shoulders so she too could see John Lewis cross that bridge one last time.
John Lewis shed blood for the right to vote, as surely as any veteran of any foreign war. It is to John Lewis that this edition of The Cornwall Democrat is dedicated. Rest in Power, Congressman Lewis.
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This election season, Congressman Lewis’s legacy is on the line. Learn what you can do to beat back the Republicans’ attacks on civil rights.