Lillian Miles Lewis, the “devoted wife” of Congressman John Lewis, D-Atlanta, has died, the civil rights icon’s office said today in a statement.

According to a 2003 Atlanta Magazine profile, Lewis and the Los Angeles native, a librarian at Atlanta University, were introduced by a friend at a New Year’s Eve party in 1967. Less than one year later, the two married and settled into a home in southwest Atlanta.

In 1986, she told the Atlanta Journal that she never imagined her husband would one day be heading to Washington, D.C.

“When I married John, my best friend said, `You are so dumb going into this marriage that you don’t even know how much money he earns,'” Lewis told the paper. “The U.S. Congress? No, capital N-O, exclamation point, so forth and so forth.”