Who is John Lewis, the man leading the House sit-in?

In an effort to force the  Republicans to vote on gun control legislation, a group of Democrats, led by Rep. John Lewis, (D-Ga.), are staging a sit-in on the floor of the House.

According to Lewis and other Democrats who spoke Wednesday, they were spurred to action after the Senate’s failure to pass measures aimed at closing the “gun show loophole,” and better regulating gun background checks.

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Lewis gave an impassioned speech on the House floor saying, “The time for silence and patience is long gone."

“We were elected to lead, Mr. Speaker. We must be headlights, and not taillights. We cannot continue to stick our heads in the sand and ignore the reality of mass gun violence in our nation. Deadly mass shootings are becoming more and more frequent. Mr. Speaker, this is a fact. It is not an opinion. We must remove the blinders. The time for silence and patience is long gone.

“We are calling on the leadership of the House to bring common-sense gun control legislation to the House Floor. Give us a vote. Let us vote. We came here to do our jobs. We came here to work. The American people are demanding action.”

The sit-in isn’t the first for Lewis – far from it. He came to national prominence as a founding member of the civil rights movement in the late ’50s and ’60s.

Lewis, born in Alabama in 1940, grew up in the segregated South. He said he was inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to stand up for his rights as an American.

According to Lewis’ House biography, he was organizing sit-ins as a student at Fisk University. In 1961, he was one of the “Freedom Riders”, a group which challenged segregation at bus terminals across the South. When he was 22, Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tenn.

Through his activity, he was named chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was largely responsible for organizing student activism in the civil rights movement. Two years later, in 1963 when he was 23, he had already become known as one of the “Big Six” leaders of the movement.

Lewis had major roles in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, including the encounter on the Edmund Pettis Bridge.

In the 1970s, Lewis was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to head up the federal volunteer agency, ACTION. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council.

He has been in Congress since 1986, serving as U.S. Representative of Georgia's Fifth Congressional District.

Cox Media Group