Civil rights hero and staunch LGBTQ ally John Lewis has died at the age of 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Lewis, who served 17 terms in Congress as a Democratic Representative of Atlanta, was born to sharecroppers in Troy, Alabama in the ‘40s.
He was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped organize the March on Washington, the civil rights march where Martin Luther King, Jr.
gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Lewis was the last survivor of the “Big Six,” a group of history-making civil rights activists led by Dr.
King. The congressman was a longtime ally of the LGBTQ community, supporting same-sex marriage in the early 2000s, more than a decade prior to the Supreme Court decision for marriage