John Lewis’ constituents are fighting back after Trump attacked him

Constituents of the civil-rights icon and Georgia Rep. John Lewis have come to his defense Saturday after he was attacked by President-elect Donald Trump on Twitter.

Lewis’ constituents snapped back at Trump on social media. John Lewis and the hashtags, “defend the fifth,” and “Stand with John Lewis” were trending Saturday evening, with numerous tweets from locals who posted pictures of the fifth district, with comments for Trump.

Here are a few of those posts:

Trump called Lewis’ district “horrible,” “falling apart,” and “crime-infested.”

Lewis represents the Fifth Congressional District in Georgia – an area that includes nearly 750,000 people. Fifty-eight percent of the district is African-American. The district includes downtown Atlanta, parts of Fulton and DeKalb counties, and several other sections, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The New York Times noted that Lewis’ district is home to the wealthy suburb of Buckhead, the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield-Jackson, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Lewis also has a decades-long record in service of civil rights. He is one of the six key African-American leaders from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s. He is regularly mentioned with movement luminaries like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, Jr., of the National Urban League, and James Farmer, Jr., who promoted nonviolent protests to fight segregation.

The president-elect has a long history of contentious relations with the African-American community. At the height of his real-estate career, Trump, his father, and their management company were involved in a lawsuit brought by the US Justice Department in 1973 on accusations of discrimination against black people who sought to rent apartments from them.

About 8% of registered black voters chose Trump in the 2016 presidential election, according to exit polls cited by the Pew Research Center, NBC News, and CNN.

Trump’s tantrum against Lewis comes on the weekend of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

It followed Lewis’ comments that he does not consider Trump a legitimate president, citing Russia’s interference in the election. Lewis said, because of that, he would not attend Trump’s inauguration. More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have followed suit.