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
TROY, Ala. — .
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 about is the John Lewis who would gravitate to the least of us,” his brother Henry Grant Lewis said. Even as a busy congressman, he always made time to attend family functions or to make a surprise appearance at a school or birthday party. At his 1958 meeting with King, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and civil rights lawyer Fred Gray, Lewis talked about the possibility of a lawsuit to try to integrate the university at Troy, Gray recently recalled. The lawsuit ultimately did not happen because of concerns about retaliation his parents would face in the majority-white county.
In his autobiography, “Walking with the Wind,” Lewis described how as a youngster he longed to go the county’s public library but wasn't allowed because it was for whites only.He would eventually apply for a library card there, knowing he would be refused, in what he considered his first official act of resistance to racial apartheid.
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