John Lewis, Part 1: Growing up in Rural Alabama in the Jim Crow Era
Seeds of John Lewis’s activism can be traced back to his early childhood near the town of Troy in rural Alabama. Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, and raised with nine siblings on a cotton farm where his parents and siblings and, earlier, his grandparents worked long hours for little pay as sharecroppers – in the early 1940s, the average sharecropper family’s income was less than 65 cents a day. As a child, Lewis could tell things weren’t right from the omnipresent “Whites Only” signs on the nicer drinking fountains, restrooms, waiting rooms, hotels, telephone booths, restaurants, and cemeteries – not to mention the “Whites Only” sections of buses, movie theaters, and neighborhoods – and segregated schools. Segregation was so ingrained in Alabama that Bibb Graves, Governor of Alabama from 1927 to 1931 and 1935 to 1939, was the Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan when he was elected. Lewis was 15 when he was first inspired by