“I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” Lewis said in a statement. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
Photo: Riccardo S. Savi/2013 Getty Images On Sunday night, Georgia Representative and civil rights leader John Lewis announced that he is being treated for Stage IV pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of nine percent according to the American Cancer Society, though Lewis also announced he would continue to represent Georgia’s fifth district, which encompasses about three-fourths of Atlanta. “To my constituents: being your representative in Congress is the honor of a lifetime,” he wrote. “I will return to Washington in coming days to continue our work and begin my treatment plan, which will occur over the next several weeks.
Lewis, who has represented the fifth district since 1986, was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was active in the Freedom Rides in 1961, the March on Washington in 1963, and the Selma to Montogmery March in 1965; he had his skull broken on Bloody Sunday when white police officers beat protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
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