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 Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering a sermon on the radio. Around the same time, Lewis was riveted by the activism of Rosa Parks. The 12/5/1955-12/20/1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, sparked by Parks’ courageous refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger and subsequent arrest for violating the city’s segregation laws, motivated Lewis to learn more about the fight for civil rights.
When he was 16, Lewis visited the public library to check out books. The library is for “Whites only, not for Coloreds,” the librarian told him. That was a tipping point for Lewis, when, despite his parents’ warnings, his thoughts turned to action. From then on, Lewis told himself, “Whenever you see something that is not right and not fair, you have a moral obligation to continue to speak up, to speak out.”
The heinous murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till on August 28, 1955 deepened Lewis’ resolve. Horrific images of Till’s mutilated body, and the subsequent acquittal of his killers, affected Lewis deeply. This catalyzed his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. He viewed Till’s murder as a call to fight for racial equality and justice, later saying, “It could easily have been me.”
John Lewis first met Martin Luther King, Jr. in March 1958. King had invited Lewis to Montgomery after being impressed by a letter Lewis wrote to him expressing interest in the civil rights movement. Upon meeting the then-18-year-old Lewis, King addressed him: “So, you are John Lewis, the boy from Troy.” Little did they know that the boy from Troy would grow to become a legend of the civil rights movement.
John Lewis’s “Note to Self” as a child, including a preview of what’s to come:
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