John Lewis: A Life

Name: John Lewis: A Life
Author: David Greenberg
ISBN: 9781982143008

David Greenberg

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John Lewis: A Life

David Greenberg

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Presents a biography of civil rights giant John Lewis, drawing on more than forty archives, untapped private papers, and interviews with Lewis and 250 people who knew him, including Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Only Martin Luther King Jr. contributed more to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s than John Lewis. He was a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, a Freedom Rider who integrated bus stations in the South, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during its heyday. His vicious beating by state troopers in Selma, Alabama, galvanized political opinion to pass the historic Voting Rights Act. Less well-known are Lewis's post-civil rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project that enrolled millions of African American voters across the South and began his political career in Atlanta. In a bitter upset of his best friend and fellow activist, Julian Bond, Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986 and served there until he died in 2020. David Greenberg's account of Lewis's Washington years reveals a congressman who, while famously dauntless and principled, was also surprisingly canny and politically adroit. With new insights about his personal and professional relationships, provides a biography of a man whose heroism during the civil rights era helped to bring America a new birth of freedom.

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