LEWISTON, Maine — Civil rights leader and Georgia U.S. Rep. John Lewis will deliver the 150th Bates College commencement address on Sunday, May 29.
Lewis, who as a college student organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and is perhaps most responsible for the passage of the Voting Rights Act two years later, will receive a doctor of humane letters from the Lewiston college.
In 2013, Lewis received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Also honored at the 2016 commencement will be Lisa Genova, a 1992 Bates graduate, a neuroscientist and author of the best-selling novel “Still Alice”; Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist and author of “Stumbling on Happiness”; and Robert Witt, a 1962 graduate of Bates who “transformed the University of Alabama into one of the country’s best public universities,” according to a Bates news release.
“We are profoundly honored to be joined for this historic commencement by these distinguished leaders, two of whom we are proud to claim as our own graduates,” Bates President Clayton Spencer said in the release. “And we are thrilled that the commencement address will be delivered by Congressman Lewis, whose life and work exemplify the animating values of this institution.”
In 2013, voting rights historian Ari Berman wrote in The Nation, “Of all the surviving leaders of the [Voting Rights Act] movement, Lewis is most responsible for its passage and its overwhelming reauthorization four times by Congress. He is the soul of the voting rights movement and its most eloquent advocate.”
The Bates College Class of 2016 includes 470 students representing more than 30 states, the District of Columbia, and about 40 countries.