John R. Lewis, who died in July 2020, was an extraordinary man. Born poor, the son of tenant farmers in rural, segregated Alabama, Lewis was one of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders by the age of twenty-three. He spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, when Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.

Lewis went on to serve seventeen terms as a US Congressman from Atlanta, but his place in American history was forged on the civil rights battlefields of the American South. Whether organising sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Tennessee, joining the Freedom Rides, or marching in cities around the South, Lewis put his body on the line to secure the rights of African Americans. In His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the power of hope, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham tells the story of Lewis’s early life and his role in the civil rights movement.