‘Conscience of Congress’ Spent Life Being in ‘Good Trouble’ U.S. Rep. John Lewis. WASHINGTON--John Robert Lewis rubbed the scar on his forehead, a reminder of the fractured skull he suffered when Alabama state troopers assaulted civil rights marchers trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965. “From time to time, looking in a mirror, I tend to notice it,” he told a news reporter in an interview that marked the 50th anniversary of the protest, and of the beating by a nightstick that left the scar. The march, known as “Bloody Sunday,” helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act and change the arc of American history. “It just reminds me that some of us gave a little blood on that bridge to redeem the soul of America, to make America better,” U.S. Rep. Lewis said. John Robert Mr. Lewis, diagnosed last December with pancreatic cancer, died Friday at age 80. Born the child of Alabama sharecroppers, he became the youngest of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who spoke at the March on Washington in 1963. By the time he died, he was the elder statesman for a new generation of racial protests fueled by outrage over the murder of George Floyd and other unarmed Black men by police. His final public appearance was a quiet visit on a Sunday morning last month at Black Lives Matter Plaza across from the White House. An outpouring of accolades and grief across partisan lines followed the announcement of his death. Mr. Lewis leaves a formidable legacy not because of his personal eloquence--he lacked the soaring oratory of Martin Luther King Jr.--nor because of landmark legislation he drafted. Instead, he was a figure of moral authority, grounded in his adherence to principles of equal rights and nonviolent protest, and in his willingness to repeatedly put his life on the line in Selma and elsewhere. “A biblical figure,” said historian Jon Meacham, author of a biography of Mr. Mr. Lewis being published this fall. Many called him “the conscience of the Congress.” “I thought I was going to die on that bridge,” Mr. Lewis said of the iconic Selma march. He thought it could be his final protest. The notion that down the road he might counsel presidents and serve in Congress for decades would have been unfathomable then. “I would have said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re out of your mind; you don’t know what you’re talking about,’” he told me. Yet that is precisely what he did. Obama’s inscription: ‘Because of you, John,’ presidents knew his name. As a young man, Mr. Lewis was one of a half-dozen civil rights leaders who met with President John F. Kennedy in 1963 to tell him they were holding a March on Washington, news that the White House didn’t welcome. Two years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with one of the pens he used to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the photos of the brutal crackdown on the Edmund Pettus Bridge propelled its passage. As a congressman from Georgia, Mr. Lewis was an ally of Bill Clinton and an outspoken opponent of George W. Bush, a critic of his decision to invade Ir
