“We threw my bag back in Bevel’s car, floored it east and caught up in Murfreesboro,” Mr.

He arrived to find that his scheduled bus had already departed.

Lewis was driven to the bus station by two friends, James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette. Lewis nearly missed his opportunity, according to his 1998 autobiography, “Walking With the Wind.” After receiving his bus ticket to Washington, D.C., from CORE, Mr.

Lewis, then 21, represented the Nashville movement, which staged demonstrations at department stores and sit-ins at lunch counters. That movement was only moderately successful, but it led to the Freedom Rides of 1961, which forever changed the way Americans traveled between states. In 1947, the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE, created a “Journey of Reconciliation” to draw attention to racial segregation in public transportation in Southern cities and states across the United States. The riders were attacked and beaten, and one of their buses was firebombed, but the rides changed the way people traveled and set the stage for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, was among the original 13 Freedom Riders who rode buses across the South in 1961 to challenge segregation in public transportation. But his legacy of confronting racism directly, while never swaying from his commitment to nonviolence, started long before he became a national figure. Representative John Lewis, who died on Friday at 80, was an imposing figure in American politics and the civil rights movement.

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