Tributes paid to civil rights icon John Lewis who has died aged 80
Video report by ITV News Correspondent Rachel Younger
Former US president Barack Obama has led tributes to civil rights hero John Lewis, whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanise opposition to racial segregation, has died aged 80.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed Mr Lewis’s death late on Friday night, calling the veteran politician “one of the greatest heroes of American history”.
Tributes were paid to Mr Lewis from several former presidents and high profile human rights campaigners.
Mr Obama said Mr Lewis, "did not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example."
“Considering his enormous impact on the history of this country, what always struck those who met John was his gentleness and humility," Barack Obama wrote.
"Early on, he embraced the principles of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience as the means to bring about real change in this country, understanding that such tactics had the power not only to change laws, but to change hearts and minds as well.”
Another former president Bill Clinton said: "Always true to his word, his faith, and his principles, John Lewis became the conscience of the nation.”
Civil rights organisation the NAACP said Mr Lewis "fought harder and longer than anyone in our nation’s continuing battle for civil rights and equal justice," while Reverend Jesse Jackson described him as being what "patriotism and courage look like".
He was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists, a group led by Martin Luther King Jr that had the greatest impact on the movement.
He was best known for leading some 600 protesters in the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
At age 25 — walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat — Mr Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten by police.
His skull was fractured, and nationally televised images of the brutality forced the country’s attention on racial oppression in the South.
Within days, Reverend King led more marches in the state, and President Lyndon Johnson soon was pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.
The bill became law later that year, removing barriers that had barred black people from voting.
Mr Lewis turned to politics in 1981, when he was elected to the Atlanta City Council.
He won his seat in Congress in 1986 and spent much of his career in the minority.
After Democrats won control of the House in 2006, Mr Lewis became his party’s senior deputy whip, a behind-the-scenes leadership post in which he helped keep the party unified.
Mr Lewis said he had been arrested 40 times in the 1960s, five more as a congressman.
At 78, he told a rally he would do it again to help reunite immigrant families separated by the Trump government.
“There cannot be any peace in America until these young children are returned to their parents and set all of our people free,” Mr Lewis said in June, recalling the “good trouble” he got into protesting segregation as a young man.
“If we fail to do it, history will not be kind to us,” he shouted. “I will go to the border. I’ll get arrested again. If necessary, I’m prepared to go to jail.”
In a speech the day of the House impeachment vote of President Trump, Mr Lewis explained the importance of that vote.
“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us ‘what did you do? what did you say?’
“We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”
Mr Lewis’s wife of four decades, Lillian Miles, died in 2012. They had one son, John Miles Lewis.