John Lewis was born in rural Pike County on February 21, 1940, to sharecroppers during an era of segregation in education and public facilities and legal discrimination that prevented African Americans in the South from voting. Denied access to the public library in Troy and educated in segregated schools, he was inspired by Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to oppose segregation. While attending college in Nashville, he took part in lunch counter sit-ins, and in 1961 racist whites brutally beat him and other Freedom Riders during demonstrations testing compliance with the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia court decision. Lewis was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and served as its president from 1963 to 1966. At age 23, he was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and he and Hosea Williams were among the marchers severely beaten and tear-gassed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday, an attack that led President Lyndon Johnson to push Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Counted among the Big Six leaders of the civil rights movement, Lewis later settled in Atlanta, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as associate director of the federal volunteer agency ACTION, served on the Atlanta City Council, and in 1986 was elected to represent metro Atlanta in the United States House of Representatives, where he served for more than three decades. He held leadership roles on numerous major congressional committees and, as a member of the Interior Committee, was the chief sponsor of a 15-year effort to create the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian-affiliated museum that opened on the National Mall in 2016. Widely regarded during his congressional career as the conscience of the Congress, he received the Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2011, introduced the first African American president on the 50th anniversary of the Selma march in 2015, and published his biography Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement in 1998.