Two civil rights icons died on 6/17/2020-John Robert Lewis died at age 80 after a battle with cancer. C.T. Vivian died at age 90 of natural causes.

They were the epitome of "good trouble" -- Lewis' favorite saying and approach to confronting injustices guided by his belief in nonviolence. They worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the forefront of the historic struggle for racial justices in the 1960s. At the time, their bloody beatings during protests shocked the nation and galvanized support that led to key changes in the fight for equality. For their years of arrests, confrontations and unyielding demands for justice, they received the highest civilian honor from the nation's first Black President-Barack Obama.

Lewis, a Democrat who served as the US representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district for more than three decades, was considered a moral conscience of Congress because of his belief in a nonviolent fight for civil rights.

A follower and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr., he participated in lunch counter sit-ins, joined the Freedom Riders in challenging segregated buses and -- at the age of 23 -- was a keynote speaker at the historic 1963 March on Washington.

At age 25, he also helped lead a march for voting rights on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he and other marchers were met by heavily armed state and local police who attacked them with clubs, fracturing Lewis' skull.

Images from that "Bloody Sunday" shocked the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 2011, after more than 50 years on the front lines of the civil rights movement, President Barack Obama placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on his neck.
(CNN)