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Civil Rights Leader John Lewis
At the age of twenty-three, John Lewis (b. 1940) was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As chairman of SNCC, John Lewis planned to deliver a speech denouncing the Kennedy civil rights bill as "too little and too late." When copies of the speech were distributed on August 27, other chairs of the march insisted that it be revised. James Forman re-wrote Lewis's speech on a portable typewriter in a small anteroom behind Lincoln's statue during the program. SNCC's initial assertion "we cannot support, wholeheartedly the [Kennedy] civil rights bill" was replaced with "We support it with great reservations." |