John Robert Lewis died at age 80 after a battle with cancer. Rev. Cordy Tindell "C.T." Vivian died at age 95 of natural causes.
Both men were the epitome of "good trouble" -- Lewis' favorite saying and approach to confronting injustices guided by his belief in nonviolence.
They worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the forefront of the historic struggle for racial justice in the 1960s.
At the time, their bloody beatings during protests shocked the nation and galvanized support that led to key changes in the fight for racial justice. For their years of jailings, confrontations and unyielding demands for justice, they both received the highest civilian honor from the nation's first Black President.
John Robert Lewis
John Lewis was more than an icon of the civil rights movement. He was also a beloved Georgia congressman, a political force and an ally for marginalized communities nationwide.
"Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history: Congressman John Lewis, the conscience of the Congress," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.
Lewis, a Democrat who served as the US representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district for more than three decades, was considered a moral conscience of Congress because of his belief in a nonviolent fight for civil rights. He called it good trouble.
His passion for equal rights was backed by a long record of action that included dozens of arrests during protests against racial and social injustice.
A follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., he participated in lunch counter sit-ins, joined the Freedom Riders in challenging segregated buses and -- at the age of 23 -- was a keynote speaker at the historic 1963 March on Washington.
"We do not want our freedom gradually; we want to be free now," he said at the time.
"Sometimes when I look back and think about it, how did we do what we did? How did we succeed? We didn't have a website. We didn't have a cellular telephone," Lewis has said of the civil rights movement.
At age 25, he also helped lead a march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other marchers were met by heavily armed state and local police who attacked them with clubs, fracturing Lewis' skull.
Images from that "Bloody Sunday" shocked the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Cordy Tindell Vivian
C.T. Vivian was also a major force in the civil rights movement. He worked alongside King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the struggle for racial equality.
He was also part of the Freedom Riders.
His civil rights actions started decades ago with his first nonviolent protest in 1947 -- a lunch counter sit-in in Peoria, Illinois.
Vivian had a strong religious upbringing and he and other ministers fo
