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John Lewis, who has died at the age of 80, was considered one of the last living icons of the United States civil rights movement of the 1960s, organizing protests, enduring beatings by white police officers and mobs, and going on to have an outsized role in American politics for 60 years.

Lewis, an Alabama sharecropper's son elected in 1986 as a Democrat from Georgia to the US House of Representatives, died on Friday after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

As a young man, Lewis became a protege of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr, and was the youngest of the so-called Big Six activists who organized the 1963 March on Washington where King gave his iconic I Have A Dream speech.