John Robert Lewis Feb. 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020 - Nashville - Tennessee Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

John Robert Lewis was born on Feb. 21, 1940 to sharecropper parents in Troy, Ala. He entered Nashville's American Baptist Theological Seminary in 1957 and soon began attending non-violence workshops at Clark Memorial Methodist Church with the Rev. James Lawson. These workshops were the foundation of the Nashville Sit-Ins Movement. In late 1959. Lewis took part in "test” sit-ins at nearby Cain-Sloan and Harvey's and was in the group of students arrested at Woolworth on Feb. 27. 1960
Here, Lewis and nine other reinforcement Freedom Riders boarded a Greyhound bus to Ala. on May 17. 1961. In 1963, he was elected chair of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee and helped plan and was a keynote speaker at the March on Washington. He was attacked in Selma on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 as part of a voting rights campaign. A 1967 Fisk University graduate, Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986 serving 17 terms until his death on July 17, 2020.

Marker Name: John Robert Lewis Feb. 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020 Marker Location: City Type of Marker: Person Marker Number: 232 Group(s) Responsible for placing Marker: The Historical Commission of Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County.

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Date Logged Log User Rating   07/06/2023 Historic Markers visited it