John Lewis

It was March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama.

A Sunday. Several hundred people were walking toward the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They meant to reach Montgomery.

At the front was Hosea Williams. And a young man of twenty-five: John Lewis.

At the bridge, the marchers asked to pray.

They were attacked. Nightsticks, whips, tear gas. About seventy people were injured. Seventeen were hospitalized. John Lewis suffered a fractured skull.

The day became known as "Bloody Sunday."

The images of that day helped pass the Voting Rights Act that same year.

John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, near Troy, in Pike County, Alabama. His parents, Eddie and Willie Mae Carter Lewis, were sharecroppers. They had ten children.

As a boy, he listened to Martin Luther King on the radio. It was the time of the Montgomery bus boycott.

In December 1957, he applied to Troy State College, which was all-white. He never received an answer.

In the spring of 1958, he travelled to Montgomery. There he met King.

He studied in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1960, he took part in the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins.

In 1961, he was one of the Freedom Riders. At the Montgomery bus station, he was beaten. He stayed true to nonviolence.

He co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, and chaired it from 1963 to 1966.

In 1963, he spoke at the March on Washington, before the famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Then came Selma.

Later, he entered politics. In 1977, he lost a special election. He served on the Atlanta City Council. In 1986, he was elected to the House of Representatives, for Georgia. He was only the second African American to represent the state in Congress since Reconstruction.

He served there from January 3, 1987, until his death. He was called "the conscience of the Congress."

He called civil disobedience "good trouble." He spoke of a "beloved community." He told others to keep the faith.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

John Lewis died on July 17, 2020, in Atlanta. He was 80. On July 27 and 28, he lay in state at the Capitol, in Washington.

His "beloved community" echoes Ubuntu without merging with it. In its own way, it says that we only become free together.

A sharecroppers' son had been beaten on a bridge. Fifty-five years later, his country came to say goodbye to him at the Capitol.