John Lewis (born February 21, 1940, near Troy, Alabama, U.S.—died July 17, 2020, Atlanta, Georgia) was an American civil rights leader and politician best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and for leading the march that was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”Lewis was the son of Alabama sharecroppers.