The tweets below are the most effective way of introducing the man, John Lewis to the average Nigerian. He’s the most recent victim of Donald Trump’s verbal attacks and it’s no news that a Trump Twitter attack makes an otherwise silent player a superstar.

Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2017

mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2017

In this clime, John Lewis may not be a newsmaker but in the United States, he is celebrated as a civil rights activist who was deeply inspired by the late Martin Luther King. In 1963, John Lewis was one of the ‘Big Six’ leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, he led as Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a position he used to mobilise other student activists for sit-ins. Before becoming the pivotal member of the movement that he was, Lewis had actively engaged in protests as a student at Fisk University. At a time when white supremacy was largely pronounced in communities including schools, John Lewis participated in sit-in demonstrations against segregation in lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.

Few years before he joined the Movement, Lewis was one of the brave Black Americans who participated in the Freedom Rides in 1961. The Freedom Riders travelled across the South to challenge the segregation in interstate transportation. By sitting in bus seats reserved for White people, Lewis and the other Riders pressured the American government to enforce the Supreme Court ruling that made segregated interstate transportation illegal. He was among those who were severely beaten and injured in the violent attacks against the Riders.

In 1965, John Lewis alongside Hosea Williams led a march of about 600 people from Selma to Montgomery across the Edmund Pettus Bridge (this was the event recreated in the 2015 Hollywood movie, Selma). They were protesting in favour of voting rights for African Americans and against an injunction that was passed preventing three or more people from gathering and talking about civil rights and voting.

The peaceful march was foiled by Alabama state troopers who attacked the protesters and left Lewis himself with a fractured skull. The video and photo proof of the attack helped to garner national attention, the day was tagged “Bloody Sunday” and the passage of the Voting Rights of 1965 was accelerated.

John Lewis later became the Director of the Voter Education Project in 1970. In this capacity, he worked to ensure the registration of over four million minority voters.

Since 1981 when he got elected into the Atlanta City Council, John Lewis has been in active politics as a United States Congressman representing Georgia’s 5th District in the House of Representatives. Despite his old age, John Lewis still led a sit-in in the House of Representatives with 39 other House Democrats in June 2016. This was in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. They demanded that Congress took definitive steps against gun violence but were unsuccessful.

The faceoff with Trump

John Lewis, in an interview with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, said Donald Trump’s presidency was “illegitimate” and he would not attend the inauguration on Friday. Trump responded like this in a second series of tweets after the ones read at the beginning of this post.

John Lewis said about my inauguration, "It will be the first one that I've missed." WRONG (or lie)! He boycotted Bush 43 also because he…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017

"thought it would be hypocritical to attend Bush's swearing-in….he doesn't believe Bush is the true elected president." Sound familiar! WP

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017

Lewis has confirmed Trump’s tweets through a spokesperson who acknowledged that he did not attend former President Bush’s inauguration as a form of dissent “as he did not believe in the outcome of the election”.

There have been varying responses to the matter, including one from a county official in Georgia who referred to John Lewis as a “racist pig” in a Facebook post and described all his wins in the House as illegitimate. Validating Trump’s first set of tweets, fellow congressman representing Iowa, Rep. Steve King said John Lewis has not contributed in any way to legislation in a long time but only thrives on his status as a civil rights icon. He said, “I’ve served with John Lewis for quite some time now and we don’t really always, I don’t know that we’ve ever found ourselves where we’ve been working together on legislation in that way. But I have long contemplated the idea of just going to the floor and saying, ‘John Lewis, thank you for your contribution to civil rights during the civil rights era. I would appreciate it if you would contribute something since then. It’s been a half a century.’ And a number of us have watched that and said, ‘He trades off of it.’ And I guess that’s fine. But he should be doing some other things too. And I haven’t seen it happen from him.”

Meanwhile, other Democrats have declared that they will also boycott the inauguration and African Americans have described Trump as repeatedly condescending and his remarks an insult to the Civil Rights Movement.

76 year old, John Lewis has received the highest civilian award granted by President Barack Obama, the Medal of Freedom, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, and the only John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage Award” for Lifetime Achievement ever granted by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation among many others.

He is the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel memoir trilogy MARCH, a book used in schools across the United States to teach about the Civil Rights Movement.