Congressman John Lewis, one of the “Big Six” leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement, said Thursday he was moved to tears when he saw the video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minnesota.
“The madness must stop,” the 80-year-old Georgian told “CBS This Morning” co-anchor Gayle King.
“I kept saying to myself: How many more?” he said. “How many young black men will be murdered?”
Floyd’s death has galvanized a younger, diverse and global group of civil rights activists, shifting the mantle of the civil rights movement from a generation that defeated the discriminatory and segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era in America’s Deep South.
“It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds and thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets to speak up, to speak out,” he said.
Lewis is the sole surviving keynote speaker at the massive 1963 demonstration where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have A Dream” speech. Lewis was savagely beaten, nearly to death on several occasions, as a young activist. In one instance, his skull was fractured in the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a protest he helped organize that encapsulated the momentous changes taking place in America at the time.
Today’s movement “feels and looks so different,” he said.
“It is so much more massive and all-inclusive. To see people from all over the world taking to the streets, to the roadways, to stand up, to speak up, to speak out, to do what I call ‘getting in trouble,’ ” Lewis said. “And with a sense of determination and commitment and dedication, there will be no turning back. People now understand what the struggle was all about. It’s another step down the very, very long road toward freedom, justice, for all humankind.”
He encouraged today’s demonstrators to adopt the same philosophy of change through nonviolent protest that guided the civil rights movement of 60 years ago, and he implored President Donald Trump not to crack down on “orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protests.”
“You cannot stop the call of history,” Lewis said.
Quoting King, Lewis advised the demonstrators: “Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. The way of love is a much better way.”
In the ’60s, Lewis said, “the great majority of us accepted the way of peace, the way of love, philosophy and discipline of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living,” he said. “There’s something cleansing, something wholesome, about being peaceful and orderly.”
Lewis is optimistic the protests will bring about meaningful change “to respect the dignity and the worth of every human being, and it doesn’t matter the color or their background or whether they’re male or female, gay or straight.
“We’re one people, we’re one family,” he said. “We all live in the same house, not just the American house but the world house.”
The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Lewis traveled as a young man throughout the South with the Freedom Riders, fighting with other African Americans for the right to use what were whites-only lunch counters, restrooms and waiting rooms. Lewis was arrested more than 40 times from 1960 to 1966, and he once spent 31 days in the Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi.
On the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday attack in 2011, then-President Barack Obama walked across the Pettus Bridge with Lewis, then presented him the Medal of Freedom.
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Lewis, who has represented Georgia in the House of Representatives since 1987, announced in December that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
“I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said in a statement at the time. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
He appeared thin and gaunt in his interview, and said his health is improving.