John Lewis

John Lewis coined the phrase “good trouble, necessary trouble” when speaking about his lifelong non-violent approach to reverse injustice to African Americans.

A staunch member of the Civil Rights movement and close ally and confidante of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis was at the forefront of peaceful marches, protests and sit-ins beginning with the movement’s infancy.

He also endured many police and counter-protester beatings and imprisonment.

“Sometimes when I look back and think about it, how did we do what we did? How did we succeed?” Lewis said of his more than 50 years in the Civil Rights movement. “We didn't have a website. We didn’t have a cellular telephone.” 

“But I felt when we were sitting in at those lunch counter stools, or going on the Freedom Ride, or marching from Selma to Montgomery, there was a power and a force. God Almighty was there with us.”

Angered by the unfairness

Lewis attributed much of his activism from his association with Dr. King. However, he was also angered by the unfairness of the Jim Crow South and launched his “good trouble” with organized protests and sit-ins.

In the early 1960s, Lewis joined the Freedom Riders, a group consisting mostly blacks who challenged segregation laws at interstate bus terminals in the South and Washington, D.C. “We do not want our freedom gradual; we want to be free now,” he said at the time.

In 1963, at age 23, Lewis was the youngest keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington, when an estimated 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to draw attention to the continuing inequities and injustice African Americans faced. 

But perhaps Lewis’s most perilous protest was in 1965, when he led a group of about 600 marchers on a 54-mile trek from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol of Montgomery to protest the shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young black man who was shot by an Alabama state trooper while trying to protect his mother from being beaten.

As the marchers entered Montgomery, they were met on the Edmund Pettus Bridge by heavily armed local and state police officers who brutally attacked the marchers with clubs and bats. The event was captured live by television cameras and broadcast across the country in an event now known as Bloody Sunday. 

Lewis suffered a fracture skull during the beating.

“I gave a little blood on that bridge,” he said. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death.”

Soon after Bloody Sunday — and in large part because of Lewis’s and the marchers’ efforts — President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There are also current calls to rename the bridge in honor of Lewis.

Lewis also believed in forgiveness, and once described an incident when he was beaten bloody by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Many years later, in February of ’09, one of the men that had beaten us came to my Capitol Hill office — he was in his 70’s, with his son in his 40’s — and he said, ’Mr. Lewis, I am one of the people who beat you and your seat mate’” on a bus, Lewis said, adding the man said he had been in the KKK. “He said, ’I want to apologize. Will you accept my apology?’”

Lewis readily accepted his apology before the three men hugged and cried together, Lewis said.

“It is the power in the way of peace, the way of love,” Lewis said. “We must never, ever hate. The way of love is a better way.”

Born just outside of Troy Alabama, Lewis lived most of his life in Georgia and in 1987 was elected to the House of Representatives, representing Georgia’s 5th district. He served in Congress until his death in 2020. He was 80.

One highlight that Lewis never thought he would see was the election of an African American president, and he made it a point to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009. After the ceremony, he asked Obama to sign a commemorative photograph. 

Obama wrote: “Because of you, John.”