Congress to unveil stamp honoring civil rights leader John Lewis
A promotional image showing a new postage stamp honoring the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights giant who died in 2020. (U.S. Postal Service Photo)
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Leaders of both parties of the U.S. House are coming together Wednesday to honor late congressman and civil rights giant John Lewis by unveiling his postage stamp.
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, and others will reveal the final design Wednesday afternoon in the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.
The stamp had been announced in late 2022 for the upcoming year. The U.S. Postal Service's proposed design for the stamp uses a photograph taken by Marco Grob for a 2013 issue of Time magazine. Lewis, then 73 years old, wears a dark suit and blue tie and looks directly into the camera.
A 1963 picture of Lewis at a workshop on nonviolent protest in Clarksdale, Mississippi, taken by Steve Schapiro, is planned for the margin of the printed stamp sheets.
The Postal Service said the stamp "celebrates the life and legacy" of Lewis, who died at age 80 in 2020 from pancreatic cancer.
REP. JOHN LEWIS, LION OF CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, DIES AT 80
"Devoted to equality and justice for all Americans, Lewis spent more than 30 years in Congress steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s," the agency said. "Even in the face of hatred and violence, as well as some 45 arrests, Lewis remained resolute in his commitment to what he liked to call "good trouble."
Lewis' bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in Selma in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation. By that time he was a major leader in the Civil Rights Movement, having helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and spoken at the March on Washington just before Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Lewis went on to be elected to the Atlanta City Council and then to a long career in Congress, where he was frequently hailed as a moral leader.
U.S. Sen. John Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat and one-time intern for Lewis, wrote to the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee last year requesting the stamp.
Other stamps coming in the remainder of 2023 include ones honoring former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, snow globes, and NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid study.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.