RALEIGH -- U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia told an audience of mostly black college students Monday that he and others risked their lives for the right to vote.

Lewis, a civil rights leader who was one of the keynote speakers at the 1963 March on Washington, was on a fund-raising tour with Rep. Brad Miller, a Raleigh Democrat, in Miller's district.

Lewis recounted how he got involved in the civil rights movement in the late 1950s after learning about Rosa Parks and hearing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio.

He described how the country's blacks won the right to register and vote by overcoming poll taxes, literacy tests and impossible inquiries such as the number of bubbles in a bar of soap. He briefly discussed the sit-ins and freedom rides in protest of segregated lunch counters and interstate buses.

The audience was quieted by Lewis' vivid description of "Bloody Sunday," a 1965 confrontation in Selma, Ala., where state troopers met marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

"They came toward us, beating us with nightsticks and bullwhips, trampling us with horses and releasing the tear gas," Lewis said, speaking to about 300 people at St. Augustine's College. "I thought I was going to die."

Young people today might not face the concussion Lewis received in leading that march, but he encouraged audience members to take advantage of their right to vote. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965.

"You won't be beaten, you won't be jailed, you won't have to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge," said Lewis, who was arrested more than 40 times for demonstrating and marching.

"The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool that we have in a democratic society, and we must use it."

Lewis was president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization founded in 1960 at Raleigh's Shaw University.

Yasha Rao, a junior at Raleigh Charter High School, asked Lewis whether there are parallels between the discrimination faced by blacks and other racial minorities and the current controversy over a proposed constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

"I fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color," Lewis responded. "I'm not about to sit down and let people be discriminated against because of sexual orientation."

Lewis congratulated St. Aug's on the Raleigh City Council's approval last week of a 2,500-seat on-campus stadium.

St. Aug's President Dianne Boardley Suber said Lewis' remarks lent emphasis to the college's push for voter registration as a focus for students.

"We have had a firsthand experience in understanding how powerful the vote is or isn't if you don't exercise your right to control the politics through it," Suber said, referring to the college's battle with neighbors and city officials for a 5,000-seat athletic stadium, a proposal that was scaled back.

At the time of the speech Monday, Suber was not a registered voter in Wake County.