John Lewis (1940 - 2020) was a civil right activist and U.S. congressman. Inspired by the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lewis became involved in the civil rights movement by participating in lunch counter sit-ins as part of the Nashville Student Movement and went on to become one of the original Freedom Riders in 1961. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he became its chairman in 1963, was an organizer of the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and a speaker at the March on Washington. Elected to Congress in 1986, Lewis served seventeen terms representing most of Atlanta, Georgia. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. His most recent book is The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.