by Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, left an Atlanta hospital in apparent good health on Sunday. He was on his
way to an event from Detroit to Atlanta by airplane when he began to feel dizzy and sweaty and was brought to the hospital for tests and observation.
“All tests have been completed, and doctors have given him a ‘clean bill of health,'” Lewis’ spokeswoman Brenda Jones said in a statement Sunday night. “He thanks everyone who shared their thoughts, prayers and concerns during his stay.”
Lewis is well-known for his participation in the civil rights struggle of the 60s and 70s, and was the keynote speaker at the watershed March on Washington in the summer of 1963.
Lewis was one of the organizers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which joined with Martin Luther King Jr in March of 1965 to lead a voting rights march in Selma, Alabama. That event became known as “Bloody Sunday,” where many were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, including Lewis, who sustained a fractured skull. The photograph of his beating made him an icon of the civil rights movement.
Lewis was born into poverty, the son of sharecroppers, outside Troy, Alabama in 1940. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1986, serving Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. He is the last of the “Big Six” of the civil rights movement still alive. President Barack Obama awarded Lewis with the Presidential Medal of Honor in 2011.