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 his death in 2020. Born to Alabama sharecroppers in 1940, he grew up dreaming of being a preacher, but as an adolescent he also followed the burgeoning struggle for civil rights, meeting both Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. as a teenager. He met with King to discuss suing Troy University in Alabama for denying him entry on the basis of race, but he instead chose to attend the historically black American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, Tennessee. Once there, he 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 cofounding the 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.