In the 1960s, Rep. John R. Lewis (D-Ga.) was arrested, jailed, beaten and left for dead.

One of the foremost leaders of the Civil Rights movement, he is now a well-respected lawmaker in the U.S. Congress.

Last night Lewis spoke passionately before a packed ARCO Forum about his experiences in the ongoing fight for equal rights.

"Thunder may roll, lightning may flash, the wind may blow, but we must never leave the American house. This is our house," he said.

During the Civil Rights movement, Lewis served as president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders, demonstrated alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and is the only surviving speaker from the 1965 March on Washington.

He is now promoting his recent book, Walking in the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.

Lewis began his address by talking about his childhood as the son of sharecroppers in southeast Alabama, 50 miles outside of Montgomery.

"As a young child I tasted the bitter fruit of segregation. I felt the sting of discrimination," he said.

Lewis spoke of being turned away from a public library as a 10-year-old boy, simply because he was black. As part of his book-signing tour, Lewis returned to the library earlier this year, 48 years later, and was finally presented with a library card.

"We've come a distance. We've made progress," he said.

Lewis' involvement in the Civil Rights movement began in 1958, when he was attending college in Nashville. A student of the non-violent philosophy of Mohandas K. Gandhi and his idol King, Lewis helped start a sit-in campaign to protest segregated restaurant counters that would spread across the entire South.

"People would come in and put out lighted cigarettes in our hair and down our back, pour hot water on us and try to pull us off our stools," he said. "But we didn't fight back. Non-violence became a way of life for us."

"By sitting down, by sitting in, we were standing up for the very best in American tradition," Lewis added.

Lewis also spoke about his experiences as a Freedom Rider, a movement in which he and his colleagues set out to test the ban on segregated public transportation throughout the South.

During the ride, Lewis was harassed, arrested and jailed, and gained a deeper understanding of the obstacles facing the South's black voters.