Civil rights icon John Lewis remembered in his hometown
TROY, Ala. — 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.
The morning service in the city of Troy in rural Pike County was held at Troy University, where Mr. Lewis would often playfully remind the chancellor he was denied admission in 1957 because he was Black, and where decades later he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
Mr. Lewis died July 17 at the age of 80.
Saturday morning’s service was titled “The Boy from Troy,” the nickname Martin Luther King Jr. gave Mr. Lewis at their first meeting in 1958 in Montgomery, Ala.
Mr. King had sent the 18year-old Mr. Lewis a roundtrip bus ticket because Mr. Lewis was interested in trying to attend what was then an all-white university in Troy, just 10 miles from his family’s farm in Pike County.
It was the first of days of memorials and services.
On Sunday, his flagdraped casket is to be carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where the one-time “Freedom Rider” was among civil rights demonstrators beaten by state troopers in 1965.
He also was to lie in repose at the state Capitol in Montgomery. After another memorial at the U.S. Capitol, where he will lie in state, funeral services will be held in Georgia.
At the Troy University service, his brothers and sisters recalled Mr. Lewis — who was called Robert at home — as a boy who practiced preaching and singing gospel songs to the farm animals.
“I remember the day that John left home. Mother told him not to get in trouble, not to get in the way ... but we all know that John got in trouble, got in the way — but it was good trouble,” his brother Samuel Lewis said.
“And the troubles that he got himself into would change the world,” he added.
John Lewis’ casket was in the university’s arena, where attendees were seated spaced apart and masks were required for entry.
Mr. Lewis became a leader of the Freedom Riders, often facing violent crowds, and was jailed dozens of times.
In 1961, he was beaten after arriving at the same Montgomery station where he arrived three years earlier to meet Mr. King. In 1965, his skull was fractured on the bridge in Selma in the melee now known as Bloody Sunday.
His parents and siblings watched the news footage of the Selma beatings, worried that he would become the next civil rights martyr.
The Troy public library now has a sign outside honoring Mr. Lewis. Students at the university he wasn’t allowed to attend now study his life and work.