Newswise — Just as he did during the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, Rep. John Lewis used the same non-violent protest tactics on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to bring the issue of gun violence and need for certain regulations front and center, an Atlanta-based researcher said.

Maurice J. Hobson is an assistant professor of African-American Studies at Georgia State University, and a native of Selma, Ala. He grew up amid the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans in a place where Lewis was attacked by police in the 1960s. His contact information is above in the contact box for registered, logged-in users of the Newswise system.

Lewis, who represents the city of Atlanta and immediate environs, is a lion of the movement who has rallied progressives and other supporters to push Congress to adopt background checks and restrictions on guns for people on the government’s “no fly” list, Hobson said.

The unprecedented sit-in lasted for 25 hours, and was broadcast through Periscope and other social media services as House Speaker Paul Ryan cut video feed from the floor of the House to the C-SPAN network.

“I do think this is an effort to promote humanity in a world that’s lost its way in terms of the value of lives,” Hobson said. “Rep. Lewis may have violated the ‘rules of the floor,’ but right now, we are in crisis.”

Following the attack in Orlando where an armed gunman murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub, Democratic legislators faced opposition from the Republican Congressional majority to background checks and restrictions on sales to people on the federal “no-fly” list.

It should not have taken Lewis leading the sit-in to address these proposals, Hobson said, including preventing sales of guns to people living with mental illness.

“The fact that John Lewis led this sit-in, and rallied more progressive legislators just to get some kind of framework so that we can at least protect people from those who shouldn’t have guns, the fact that conservatives won’t budge – it shows that the political system we live in is all a farce,” he said.

Had Ryan used U.S. Capitol Police to remove Lewis and other fellow Democrats from the House floor, the symbolism alone – forcibly removing a man whose abuse by Selma, Ala., police became an infamous image in American history books – would have been political disaster for the GOP, Hobson said.

“If he did that, so that he could politically posture and uphold the [Republican] Party’s banner – it would have been the death knell for him and the rest of the Republican Party,” he said.

Hobson’s research interests include 20th century U.S. and African-American History, African-American studies, oral history and ethnography, urban and rural history, political economy, and popular cultural studies. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Myth, Maxim and the Making of an Olympic City, which examines the growth of Atlanta during the 1990s, the Atlanta region’s post-1996 Olympic boom, African-American migration to the Atlanta region during that time period, and the commercialization of the American South.

For more information about Hobson, visit http://aas.gsu.edu/profile/maurice-j-hobson/.