When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it was the result of decades of resistance, legal action, and the willingness of Black Americans and their allies to withstand the violence that too often accompanied the fight for equality. Late U.S. representative and civil rights icon John Lewis was brutally beaten while leading a protest in Selma, Alabama, to get the bill passed. Allison Davis looked back at Lewis’s involvement in the movement with three of his former staffers. And looking ahead to present struggles, Davis also caught up with Cornell William Brooks, former NAACP chief and now professor of the practice of public leadership and social justice at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

This piece is part of a collaboration between the Associated Press, Black News & Views, and The Amsterdam News. The work is part of the AP Inclusive Journalism Initiative supported by the Sony Foundation.