Civil rights icon and longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis was remembered Saturday — in the rural Alabama county where his story began — as a humble man who sprang from his family’s farm with a vision that “good trouble” could change the world.
Fraternity members sing in front of the casket of the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., during a service celebrating "The Boy from Troy" at Troy University on Saturday, July 25, 2020, in Troy, Ala. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020.
Lewis, who became a civil rights icon and a longtime Georgia congressman, died July 17 at the age of 80.Saturday morning’s service was titled “The Boy from Troy,” the nickname the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave Lewis at their first meeting in 1958 in Montgomery. King had sent the 18-year-old Lewis a round-trip bus ticket because Lewis was interested in trying to attend the then-all-white university in Troy, just 10 miles from his family’s farm in Pike County.
“The John Lewis I want you to know is the John Lewis who would gravitate to the least of these,” his brother Henry Grant Lewis said, a Biblical reference to Jesus’ instructions to aid those in need.His brother said on the day Lewis was sworn in to Congress that they exchanged a thumbs up. He later asked Lewis what he was thinking when they did. “He said ‘I was thinking this is a long way from the cotton fields of Alabama,’” Henry Grant Lewis recalled.
Those cotton fields were in then-segregated Pike County, where Lewis winced at the signs designating “whites only” locations. Lewis was one of 10 children born into a sharecropping family. His parents saved enough money to buy their own farm where the Lewis children worked the fields and tended the animals. A young Lewis was less fond of field work — often grousing about the grueling task — but eagerly took on the job of tending the chickens while practicing preaching.
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