On March 1, as he was battling stage 4 cancer, John Lewis returned to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march, when he was brutally beaten marching for voting rights. “We must go out and vote,” he told a crowd of thousands on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, “like we’ve never, ever voted before.” He urged the people gathered there to vote in order to “redeem the soul of America.”
The vote was personal for Lewis, who passed away late Friday evening at 80. He called it “precious, almost sacred.” He was more responsible than just about anyone for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965….
But as much as Lewis wanted people to know civil rights history, he also wanted them to know that the fight for voting rights didn’t end in 1965. “I truly believe,” Lewis said last year, when Democrats introduced a sweeping democracy reform bill to make it easier to vote, “that the way votes were not counted and purged in states like Georgia and Florida and other states changed the outcome of the last election. That must never happen again in our country. We will make it illegal.” The bill, HR 1: The For the People Act, passed the House, but Senate Republicans never brought it up for a vote.
In December 2019, Lewis presided over the House as it passed legislation to restore and modernize the Voting Rights Act, requiring states with a long history of voting discrimination to once again get federal approval for any changes to voting procedures. In a primary season marred by voting problems, like six-hour lines in Lewis’ home state of Georgia, it’s been sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk for 225 days.
Lewis, ultimately, was a man of action, not words. As he said many times, he spoke with his body and his feet—marching, protesting, getting arrested more than 40 times to advocate for change. There have already been petitions to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named after a former Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan) to honor Lewis. Maybe one day, a new Voting Rights Act will be named after him as well.