WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders will unveil on Wednesday the new stamping honoring the late Rep. John Lewis.
The preliminary stamp design released in December 2022 features a 2013 photograph of the late congressman taken by Marco Grob for Time magazine, according to a USPS press release. The selvage, or a stamp pane’s margin, will feature a 1963 photograph taken by Steve Schapiro of Lewis outside a nonviolent protest workshop.
“Devoted to equality and justice for all Americans, Lewis spent more than 30 years in Congress steadfastly defending and building on key civil rights gains that he had helped achieve in the 1960s,” the USPS statement read.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Democratic Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Lewis’s son, John Miles Lewis, are expected to speak at the unveiling program.
Lewis, D-Ga., served in the House from 1987 until his death on July 17, 2020 after fighting stage 4 pancreatic cancer for months. The civil rights icon was sometimes called the “conscience of Congress” and was a longtime proponent of peaceful protests.
“The action of Rosa Parks and the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble,” Lewis said in a 2015 speech.
His phrase “good trouble” became a rallying cry for supporters advocating for equality.
Lewis was an original member of the Freedom Riders, and his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers in Selma in 1965 during “Bloody Sunday.”
In July 2020, Lewis became the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the Capitol.
“Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe,” Lewis wrote in a 2020 New York Times op-ed published after his death. “In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.”
