Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope: Kerry Kennedy in Conversation With Heads of State, Business Leaders, Influencers, and Activists About Her Father's Impact on Their Lives by Kerry Kennedy

Author:Kerry Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Biographies & Memoirs, Historical, History & Theory, Political, Political Science
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2018-06-05T03:00:00+00:00

“Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence, yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”

—ROBERT F. KENNEDY

JOHN LEWIS

John Lewis was born in Pike County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, and attended segregated public schools. Inspired by the activism surrounding the Montgomery bus boycott and the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., he joined the civil rights movement. He organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee; was a Freedom Rider; and was beaten and arrested.

From 1963 to 1966, he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped form. At the age of twenty-three, he was an architect of and a keynote speaker at the March on Washington in August 1963.

In 1964, he coordinated SNCC’s efforts to organize voter-registration drives and community-action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year, he led over six hundred peaceful, orderly protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on a march to Montgomery for voting rights. News broadcasts and photographs of brutal attacks on the marchers by Alabama state troopers exposed the cruel reality of the segregated South and hastened the passage of the US Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Lewis has been awarded over fifty honorary degrees from prestigious colleges and universities throughout the United States, and has received numerous awards from eminent national and international institutions, including America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Serving as a US representative from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since 1986, he is known as “the conscience of the Congress.”

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