Kathleen Dowdey Productions
John Lewis
Click for March on D.C. segment Click for Growing Up segment
Long before Barack Obama’s birth, John Lewis worked the cotton fields in Pike County, Alabama as the son of a sharecropper. While attending segregated schools, he heard the voice of Martin Luther King on the radio and awoke to the possibility of a more just and equitable society. Lewis took action.
As a college student, he organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. By the time he reached Washington D.C. in August 1963, he was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a seasoned civil rights activist. While challenging segregation and demanding voter rights throughout the South, he counted dozens of attacks, beatings, arrests and imprisonment. At 23 years old, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington, he represented students like himself, the unsung foot soldiers at the front lines of the civil rights movement.
Today, Lewis remains deeply committed to the philosophy of nonviolence. An idealist and a realist at the same time, he practices his convictions within the political arena, representing Georgia’s 5th district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1987.
We are proud to release two archival segments from our library on Congressman John Lewis, produced in the early 1990s.
Do What We Can. Do What We Must
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