December 30, 2019

Civil Rights Icon Rep. John Lewis Has Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

“I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”

Rep. John Lewis and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus wait to enter the memorial services for Rep. Elijah Cummings at the US Capitol in October. Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Pool/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Rep. John Lewis, the longtime civil rights leader and congressman from Georgia’s 5th District, announced Sunday that he has been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancers in the country. He plans to undergo treatment in Washington, DC, where he will continue to work.

“I have been in some kind of fight—for freedom, equality, basic human rights—for nearly my entire life,” Lewis, 79, who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and other civil rights protests, said in a statement. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”

Lewis was diagnosed by doctors during a routine medical visit earlier this month. His faces stage 4 cancer, the disease’s most advanced stage. About three-quarters of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer die within a year, but Lewis said doctors told him that medical advances would give him a “fighting chance.”

Democratic colleagues in Washington and former President Barack Obama said they were rooting for the longtime congressman, who has served in the House of Representatives since 1987. “If there’s one thing I love” about Lewis, Obama tweeted, “it’s his incomparable will to fight. I know he’s got a lot more of that left in him. Praying for you, my friend.”

Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama, Lewis was a key organizer during the Civil Rights Movement to end racial segregation, and he was arrested and jailed dozens of times during the 1960s for his activism. In addition to joining the Freedom Rides and lunch counter protests, he was one of the “Big Six” leaders who organized the historic March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and he walked two years later in the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama.

During a commemoration of the Selma march last year, Lewis met a 10-year-old boy who traveled seven hours from Tennessee to see him. “It showed me that it doesn’t matter what your age is, how old you are, you can still be active in standing up for what you’re supposed to be for,” the boy said after Lewis embraced him and invited him to tag along for the commemorative walk.

Lewis has remained a strong moral compass for the Democrats in Congress during his years in Washington. In 2016, after a mass shooting at the Pulse night club in Orlando, he staged a sit-in on the House floor to demand a vote on a gun control bill. After Donald Trump was elected, he refused to attend the inauguration ceremony.

And this month, he gave an emotional speech urging Democrats to impeach the president over the Ukraine scandal. “There comes a time when you have to be moved by the spirit of history to take action to protect and preserve the integrity of our nation,” he said.

On Sunday, Lewis said in his statement that he is “clear-eyed about the prognosis,” but determined to “do what I have always done: I am going to fight it and keep fighting for the Beloved Community.”

“I may miss a few votes during this period, but with God’s grace I will be back on the front lines soon,” he added. “Please keep me in your prayers as I begin this journey.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate