Representative John Lewis died on Friday, July 17, at the age of 80. His family announced his death with the following statement: “He was honored and respected as the conscience of the U.S. Congress and an icon of American history, but we knew him as a loving father and brother.”

“My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise,” John Lewis once recalled.

Lewis, who has served as U.S. representative for Georgia’s fifth congressional district since the mid-’80s and has been called “the conscience of the U.S. Congress,” clearly didn’t heed his parents’ warning. The powerful noise he has made for the last several decades, his profound courage, his ability to stare down evil, is really what we honor tomorrow and every Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

History can seem so stale—even stunning victories after decades of retelling can take on the sad aroma of the schoolroom. But in their time, these struggles were so vivid, so remarkable—the players so fierce, and often so young.

From his earliest days, Lewis was at the center of the movement for social justice. “When I was 15 years old and in the 10th grade, I heard of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Lewis remembered. “Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.”

By the time he was a student at Fisk University, Lewis was leading sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville. He was among the Freedom Riders brave enough to travel by bus across the South to compel the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court ruling that made segregated interstate transportation illegal. Loathed and reviled as they moved through the Deep South, the Freedom Riders were greeted with mob violence and prison. In Montgomery, Alabama, Lewis sustained serious injuries.

Reportedly arrested more than 40 times, Lewis still bears the literal scars of the attempted Selma to Montgomery March, where he and Hosea Williams led over 600 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The demonstrators were met by state troopers who ordered them to disperse after a brief warning. When they responded by stopping, they were beaten with nightsticks. Lewis’s skull was fractured.