John Lewis, Towering Determine of Civil Rights Period, Dies at 80

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John Lewis, Towering Determine of Civil Rights Period, Dies at 80

However Mr. Lewis misplaced his household’s good will. When his mother and father realized that he had been arrested in Nashville, he wrote, they h


However Mr. Lewis misplaced his household’s good will. When his mother and father realized that he had been arrested in Nashville, he wrote, they have been ashamed. That they had taught him as a toddler to simply accept the world as he discovered it. When he requested them about indicators saying “Coloured Solely,” they advised him, “That’s the way in which it’s, don’t get in bother.”

However as an grownup, he mentioned, after he met Dr. King and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white man was a flash level for the civil rights motion, he was impressed to “get into bother, good bother, essential bother.”

Entering into “good bother” grew to become his motto for all times. A documentary movie, “John Lewis: Good Bother,” was launched this month.

Regardless of the shame he had introduced on his household, he felt that he had been “concerned in a holy campaign” and that getting arrested had been “a badge of honor,” he mentioned in an oral historical past interview in 1979 with Washington College.

In 1961, when he graduated from the seminary, he joined a Freedom Journey organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, generally known as CORE. He and others have been crushed bloody after they tried to enter a whites-only ready room on the bus station in Rock Hill, S.C. Later, he was jailed in Birmingham, Ala., and crushed once more in Montgomery, the place a number of others have been badly injured and one was paralyzed for all times.

“If there was something I realized on that lengthy, bloody bus journey of 1961,” he wrote in his memoir, “it was this — that we have been in for an extended, bloody combat right here within the American South. And I meant to remain in the midst of it.”



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