ATLANTA – The U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp honoring the late civil rights leader John Lewis next year.
The stamp will feature a photograph of Lewis taken in 2013 by Marco Grob on assignment for Time magazine, the agency announced Tuesday. The “selvage,” margin paper on a sheet of Lewis stamps, will feature a photo from 1963 of a young Lewis outside a workshop on nonviolent protest in Clarksdale, Miss.
Lewis was the last surviving speaker at the 1963 March on Washington when he died of pancreatic cancer in 2020 at the age of 80.
Lewis was beaten severely by Alabama state police in 1965 while on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., an incident that came to be known as Bloody Sunday and was instrumental in congressional passage of the federal Voting Rights Act later that year.
He was elected to Congress in 1986 representing a district centered in Atlanta and served for more than 30 years.
A postal service news release praised Lewis, who despite 45 arrests “remained resolute in his commitment to what he liked to call ‘good trouble.’ ”
Earlier this year, Congress passed legislation naming the main post office in Atlanta after Lewis.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.