Civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis dead at 80 - CNN

John Lewis," his family said in a statement.

It's another heartbreak in a year filled with them, as America mourns the deaths of nearly 140,000 Americans from Covid-19 and struggles to bring the virus under control.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced his death in a statement.

"Today, America mourns the loss of one of the greatest heroes of American history: Congressman John Lewis, the Conscience of the Congress," the California Democrat said.

Lewis had vowed to fight the disease after announcing in late December 2019 that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which was discovered as a result of a routine medical visit and subsequent testing.

"I have been in some kind of fight -- for freedom, equality, basic human rights -- for nearly my entire life.

I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now," he said in a statement at the time.

Lewis, a Democrat who served as the US representative for Georgia's 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, was widely seen as a moral conscience of Congress because of his decades-long embodiment of nonviolent fight for civil rights.

We didn't have a cellular telephone," Lewis has ">said of the civil rights movement.

In the early 1960s, he was a Freedom Rider, challenging segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South and in the nation's capital.

"We do not want our freedom gradual; we want to be free now," he said at the time.

At age 25, Lewis helped lead a march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other marchers were met by heavily armed state and local police who attacked them with clubs, fracturing Lewis' skull.

He also co-wrote a series of graphic novels about the civil rights movement, which won him a National Book Award.

Born on a Troy, Alabama, cotton farm into a segregated America on February 21, 1940, Lewis lived to see an African American elected president, a moment he said he never thought would come despite his decades long fight for equality.

He described attending President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration as an "out-of-body" experience.

"When we were organizing voter-registration drives, going on the Freedom Rides, sitting in, coming here to Washington for the first time, getting arrested, going to jail, being beaten, I never thought -- I never dreamed -- of the possibility that an African American would one day be elected president of the United States," he said at the time.

In 2011, after more than 50 years on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Lewis received the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, placed round his neck by America's first Black president.

Obama said in a statement following Lewis' death that the civil rights icon will "continue, even in his passing, to serve as a beacon" in America's journey towards a more perfect union.

"He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise.

And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example," Obama said.

Ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, Lewis said he did not consider him to be a "legitimate" president, an astonishing rebuke by a sitting member of Congress toward an incoming president.

"I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected.