Reports of Georgia Rep. John Lewis’s death that briefly circulated the Internet Saturday are inaccurate, 360aproko News has confirmed.
“Rumors are not true,” Lewis’ Chief of Staff Michael Collins told 360aproko News. “He is resting comfortably at home.”
North Carolina Rep. Alma Adams had tweeted in response to Lewis’ apparent passing on Saturday. That tweet has since been deleted.
Adams later wrote: “We deeply regret a previous tweet based on a false news report.”
Lewis, 80, has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and is undergoing treatment, and as a result, he has had to use a proxy to cast his votes in Congress.
The congressman, a civil rights icon, has remained vocal during the recent George Floyd protests, releasing a statement in late May saying that his heart is broken for the men, women and families still enduring systemic racism in the U.S.
“My fellow Americans, this is a special moment in our history. Just as people of all faiths and no faiths, and all backgrounds, creeds and colors banded together decades ago to fight for equality and justice in a peaceful, orderly, non-violent fashion, we must do so again,” Lewis wrote at the time.
Lewis, an activist during the civil rights movement and who was arrested after using a “white restroom” in 1961, told demonstrators he understood the pain they were experiencing.
“I know your pain, your rage, your sense of despair and hopelessness,” Lewis tweeted in May. “Justice has, indeed, been denied for far too long. Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand-up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive.”
Lewis also visited the Washington, D.C., Black Lives Matter mural with Mayor Muriel Bowser in June.
“It’s all going to work out,” Lewis said while on a virtual panel about racial injustice with former President Barack Obama in June. “But we must help it work out.”
“We must continue to be bold, brave, courageous, push and pull, ’til we redeem the soul of America and move closer to a community at peace with itself,” Lewis said last month. “But no one, no one, will be left out or left behind because of race or color or nationality.”
