Half-Staff Notice: Death of Rep. John Lewis
Pelosi Statement on the Passing of Congressman John Lewis (Goes to the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Website).
In accordance with the US Flag Code, the flag shall be flown at half-staff the day of and the day after the death of a sitting representative or senator.
John Lewis was born as the son of sharecroppers in the segregated South. He first rose to prominence in 1961 during the Freedom Riders bus desegregation drive for being arrested for using a whites-only bathroom. His watchwords have always been since that time “Create good trouble.”
During the march from Selma to Birmingham, Alabama over the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a Confederate traitor and subsequent member of the Ku Klux Klan), he was savagely beaten and almost killed by Alabama police officers for exercising his First Amendment rights. Seventeen people were hospitalized and fifty less-seriously injured, leading the press to name the day Bloody Sunday.
He was the only living speaker from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 when he attended President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. Until the Women’s March in 2017, the March on Washington was considered the largest civil rights march in US history, with approximately 300,000 people.
Representative Lewis served seventeen terms in the House of Representatives, first elected in an upset election in 1986.
Others can write much better about this giant of a man than I can. I recommend National Public Radio’s obituary tonight.
Rep. John Lewis, A Force In The Civil Rights Movement, Dead At 80 (NPR)