July 17, 2025
Five years ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 80.
Lewis was a “troublemaker” as a young adult, breaking the laws of his state: he broke the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.
An adherent of the philosophy of nonviolence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 45 times. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “snick”), he helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. Just 23 years old, Lewis spoke at the event. Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.
To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the lawbreaking protesters who were disrupting the “peace” of the South. But what seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were, in fact, changing minds. Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson honored those changing ideas when he went on TV to support the marchers and call for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented.
New Black voters helped to elect Lewis to Congress in 1986. He held the seat from then until his death in 2020, winning reelection 16 times.
Before Representative Lewis died, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked him “what he would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before.”
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair,” Lewis tweeted almost exactly a year before his death. “Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.”
Today, as the storm over the release of the Epstein files became a maelstrom, the American people rallied at more than 1,500 sites nationwide to protest the Trump administration in a day of action to honor Representative Lewis. Organizers of the “Good Trouble Lives On” day of action vowed to “take to the streets, courthouses, and community spaces to carry forward his fight for justice, voting rights, and dignity for all.”
“My philosophy is very simple,” Representative Lewis once told an audience. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something! Do something! Get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”
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Notes:
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/05/10/access.lewis.freedom.rides/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/17/trump-john-lewis-good-trouble-protests
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/892943749/documentary-honors-civil-rights-leader-rep-john-lewis
https://spokesman-recorder.com/2020/07/18/john-lewis-making-a-way-out-of-no-way/
X:
I joined SNCC and CORE in 1963. Got into some degree of trouble then too, once arrested in the fight for civil rights. Imagine what a joy it was to attend my daughter's graduation from Bard in 2017 and discover that the commencement speaker was John Lewis.
Great last paragraph, where Heather quotes his probably most immortal words.
Rebecca Solnit, in her own (still yet very new) Substack also refers to words -- her last being on what she calls "trickle-down words" (where she'd earlier invited dismissal of "trickle-down economics").
All of us here on Heather's (and Rebecca often quotes her, too) stay indebted to, in service to words -- as if we might see ahead of the criminality now atop our government.
In her videos, Heather often smiles. In her writing, she often stresses the ideals America, for one, has long been based on.
So, yes to her positives, Rebecca's, and so many here generous to one another.