John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil-rights leader who served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. Former Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis helped open Freedom Schools, and the Mississippi Freedom Summer. Lewis was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders in 1960 who road on a bus from Washington, DC to New Orleans, LA in an integrated fashion to pressure the federal government to reinforce the law that segregating interstate travel was unconstitutional. He was one of the original architects of the bill that helped establish the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Bryan A. Stevenson is Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a private, nonprofit law organization he founded that focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the United States. Stevenson joined the clinical faculty at New York University School of Law as Professor of Clinical Law in 1998. Stevenson’s work has won him national acclaim. In 1995, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship Award Prize. He is also a 1989 recipient of the Reebok Human Rights Award, the 1991 ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the 2000 Olaf Palme Prize in Stockholm, Sweden for international human rights. He has published several widely disseminated manuals on capital litigation and written extensively on criminal justice, capital punishment and civil rights issues.
