John Lewis to be honored at NAACP dinner

Congressman John Lewis a civil rights pioneer, will be honored at a NAACP dinner today in Detroit:

Civil Rights pioneer and U.S. Rep. John Lewis and musician Kid Rock will share the spotlight today at the Detroit NAACP branch’s annual Fight for Freedom Fund dinner at Cobo Center.

Lewis, who grew up in racially segregated Pike County, Ala., just miles from where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a movement to end segregation on Montgomery’s buses, is the keynote speaker.

Inspired by King, Lewis organized marches, led lunch-counter sit-ins, helped integrate interstate bus systems and organized voter education and registration drives.

Lewis became a symbol of the movement when he and other protesters were attacked by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they tried to march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. So horrifying was the attack that it became known as Bloody Sunday.