The World John Lewis Helped Create
Black leaders pause to reflect on the civil-rights icon and representative from Georgia, who spent decades calling for activism and “good trouble.”
Updated at 5:38 p.m. ET on July 18, 2020.
John Lewis believed in the American project and wanted to perfect it.
On August 28, 1963, Lewis stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before hundreds of thousands of people, but his mind was on those who could not be there. He thought of the Black people in Danville, Virginia, living under the heavy baton of a police state; of the sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, working for starvation wages; of the three young men facing the death penalty in Georgia for protesting. “We will go to jail if this
