The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Siblings wistfully recall his disdain for fieldwork, proudly recall his life’s impact.
We know him as John Lewis. But to his family, he was Robert (his middle name), and they remember the young man who dreamed of a life beyond the Alabama fields and Jim Crow laws.
TROY, ALABAMA — “So, you are John Lewis? The boy from Troy,” Martin Luther King Jr. said upon meeting the teenager who would become one of the civil rights movement’s most famous, vocal and long-lived members.
It was 1958 and Lewis, only 18, raw, young, impassioned and feeling called to do something for the movement, had just walked down the paneled stairs of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, to find the rising leader sitting with the church’s pastor, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy.
King had invited Lewis after receiving a letter from him asking for King’s help to integrate a state college in his hometown of Troy. That meeting was a key step in launching him on the path of activism that put him on a national and international stage.
The public grew to know Lewis as the implacable and fearless marcher and Freedom Rider. It knew him as the demonstrator arrested innumerable times and the 23-year-old who spoke at the March on Washington calling for change “now.”
More recently the public has seen the fiery congressman denouncing President Donald Trump.
But his family knew him as Robert, his middle name, and still saw in him the young man who spent his childhood preaching to the chickens he cared for, talking his way out of picking cotton and dreaming of a life beyond overheated Alabama fields and Jim Crow laws.
He remained the man who learned the values imparted by his rural tutelage, he just obeyed a call he heard that took him away for different purposes in life than those at home — a purpose his mother accepted, though she discouraged her other children from joining.
He was a teenager when his baby sister, Rosa, asked their mother about the brother whose arrests unfolded on their television.
“She told me that there were a lot of wrongs going on in the world, and Robert was trying to help right the wrongs,” Rosa Lewis Tyner said.
Growing a future
The Lewis family’s mailing address is Troy, but they are 8 miles from downtown and proudly admit they live in the “country,” on the land their father purchased 76 years ago.
By 1944, Eddie Lewis, their sharecropping father, had worked hard enough to save $300 and purchase 110 acres from a white grocer. They moved into a threeroom shack on the land, with no heat or running water, and lived in it 10 years before Eddie built a new home. That house was torn down in 1996 to make way for a newer one, that Tyner, 66, now lives in.
Her brother Henry Lewis lives in a big brick house across the road, next door to brother Samuel Lewis. Their brother Freddie’s daughter and her family are in the next house over.
“We had six mules, two horses and a tractor,” Henry Lewis said. “And they would all be in the field at the same time.”
Standing in his yard, Henry, the youngest brother at 67, says their father taught them early about working to make the future better. He bought and tended this land not for his own enjoyment, but to leave something behind for his children and grandchildren.
“He would plant a tree – a grapevine or something like that – and then he’d make the statement, ‘This grapevine will not do me any good. But it will for you,’” Henry Lewis remembered. “‘You and your kids will enjoy a lot of grapes off this vine.’”
Called beyond the fields
Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis, called “Mul” by family, had 10 children spread across 19 years. Ora. Edward. John. Adolph. William. Ethel. Freddie. Samuel. Henry. Rosa.
Ora, Edward and Adolph died before John.
The 10 children worked the farm. John Lewis loved tending the chickens but hated fieldwork.
In his autobiography, Lewis detailed how he cared for the family’s chickens, which he considered his own. Lewis, who wanted to be a minister, would preach to them, baptize them, bury them, collect their eggs, and get mad at his parents when they made a meal of one. He would remain obsessed with those chickens all his life.
“Whenever I’d call he would ask, ‘How are the chickens? How many eggs did you get?’” said Tyner, admiring the chickens she now tends to. “I would say, ‘I didn’t call you for you to ask about the chickens. You didn’t even ask how I was doing.’ Every time he would come home, he would come out here and see the chickens.”
Eddie would pull the kids out of school to work at harvest time. Nobody complained except John.
“He would say, ‘This ain’t nothing but slavery out here in this hot sun,’” Tyner said. “He would get on my mother’s nerves so bad. He was more trouble than he is good.”
John wanted to go to school. So he would hide under the house until the school bus came, then run after it.
Eddie would chase John, yelling for him to come back before John vanished onto the yellow bus.
Adolph, a giant of a man built like John Henry — the folkloric African American steel driver — would watch his brother run to the bus. Watch him run to his potential.
“Let him go, Daddy. I’ll do his work,” Adolph would say.
“( John) didn’t like the labor part of the farm work. The rest of us were fine with it,” Henry said. “He felt there was a higher calling for him. He thought there was more out there in the world and he wanted to explore it, and he did.”
Fear and shame
Lewis left Troy for good at 17, when he moved to Nashville to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary. He joined the civil rights movement in Nashville, first as a member of the Nashville Student Movement, then as a Freedom Rider, joining those who put their lives on the line testing a then-new Supreme Court ruling to desegregate public buses.
He grew into the movement. In 1963, as chairman of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington. Through years of demonstrations, he would get arrested more than 40 times and face what he said was near death from the beatings and attacks he personally suffered from the Ku Klux Klan and the police.
Back home in Troy, his parents and nine siblings watched. In his autobiography, Lewis wrote he feared his many arrests would bring shame to his family, and he had a temporary rift with them early in his career.
Tyner said the family was never ashamed of Lewis, remembering how proudly Eddie would sit up in his easy chair every time he saw John on television.
“We would watch him, and at first I didn’t comprehend it … There were just so many of them getting arrested, but once I talked to my mother and began to understand what the sit-ins were, I knew.”
But how could they be ashamed of him? He was the first Lewis to leave. The first to go to college. First to make a difference in the world.
Sitting in the family room of her house with Samuel, both wearing masks to protect themselves from the coronavirus, Tyner asked her brother: “Can you imagine a person getting beaten, knocked down in the head, arrested so many times and just doing this constantly, with people being so mean and hateful?
“He did that. He should be everybody’s hero.”
Even so, they were scared for John and themselves.
Set apart
“We knew that the chances of him getting seriously injured or killed was a real possibility,” said Henry.
And retaliation on the family was a possibility, too.
When Lewis first visited King, he wanted to talk to the great man about helping to integrate Troy State University. One of the reasons Lewis dropped his effort was that his family feared they could somehow lose their 110 acres.
“Daddy didn’t say much. It was more my mother,” Tyner said. “You could always hear her praying for John’s safety”
She discouraged others from joining the movement.
“Our parents would not have let us, because they already had one child in it,” Tyner said. “They believed in what he was doing, but it was dangerous too. I believe that John had a calling for what he did.”
“I am very proud and honored to be his little sister, with the sac
rifices he has made,” she said. “I believe that he was chosen to do what he did. Ora couldn’t have done it. Edward, Adolph. It wasn’t in us.”
Back to Troy
But as John Lewis’ prominence increased and he began to collect accolades, work often kept him away from his immediate family, including wife, Lillian, who died in 2012, and son, John-Miles, whom the couple adopted as a baby in 1976.
Lewis included his family as much as he could, often sending his siblings invitations to events where they rubbed elbows with political titans.
Henry Lewis counts meeting five presidents. He was in Washington the day his brother was sworn into Congress in 1987, and he was also there in 2011 when President Barack Obama placed a Presidential Medal of Freedom around John Lewis’ neck.
John called often, and made it back to Troy typically on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Tyner said John had been in the city too long to still have country ways.
Even when Willie Mae, who died in 2003, was living in the house by herself, Lewis would stay in a Troy hotel when he visited.
“Mul would say ‘Let him go on. He’s used to people picking up behind him and making his bed, I am not gonna do that,’” Tyner said. “But he enjoys when he comes here and hates to leave. He always talking about, “Imma retire and build me a house down here. Imma do this, Imma do that. I said, ‘You not gonna retire. Where you gonna live at?’”
Samuel Lewis said his brother’s leaving home and the work he did changed the course of their lives back in rural Alabama.
“If he hadn’t done what he done, we might still be on the farm. We farm now as somewhat of a hobby.”
Uncle Robert
Rosalynn Tyner King, Tyner’s youngest daughter, said John always tried to connect with the next generation of Lewises. He had about 30 nieces and nephews.
He came to their college graduations, hosted them in Washington and on trips like the Essence Festival for book signing.
“I grew up learning and watching him in documentaries like “Eyes on the Prize,” said King. “I would see him in pictures and stick my chest out and say, ‘That is my uncle.’ I was always proud and aware of the sacrifices he made. And all of the accolades didn’t change him as a person, and I think that speaks volumes.”
To her, he is still just family.
“I can call him on the phone and joke with him,” she said shortly before his death. “We tease him, like when we got to be taller than him. He has a little stomach, and he loves my mom’s cooking, so he would always come down to eat, then nod off on the couch. We would take pictures of him. But he was always Uncle Robert.”
At King’s graduation from the University of Chicago, the family remembers how John cried when she got her degree.
“Why you crying?” King asked him.
“I was thinking about Mul. If she could see you right now she would be so proud,” Lewis answered.
“People think a lot of you as a congressman, you can’t be crying,” King told him.
“He could drop a tear. Always,” Tyner said. “He was just always emotional. I would look at him and say, ‘Don’t start.” Saying goodbye
When John moved back to Atlanta this summer, his family would make the threehour pilgrimage from Troy every weekend to be by his side. Henry Lewis would rub his hands, asking, “Congressman, are you OK?”
Lewis told his family more than once, “I’m at peace, I’m ready.”
Said Tyner, “I am a realist. I know that everybody has to die.”
“When I saw that he was so sick, I said ‘Lord, all that he has sacrificed.’ I prayed and said, ‘Don’t let him go like this.’ I asked Him to heal him. Then one day I thought about it. He has given so much to the world and he just might be tired.”
“He’s at peace,” she said. “So, if John is ready for it, I can give him up.”