Congressman John Lewis: ‘Getting Into Good Trouble’ to Make a Better America

Unlike his mentor and role model Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who was taken from us in 1968 by an assassin’s bullet, Congressman John Lewis, 80, died in hospice after a struggle with pancreatic cancer. His obituaries have long been in preparation.

No other person has been honored more often by the Simon Wiesenthal Center than John Lewis — the recipient of both our Humanitarian Laureate and Medal of Valor, and whose words have been heard by 7 million visitors to our Museum of Tolerance. Here’s why:

His first decades of activism were detailed in his 1999 autobiography “Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement” although 20 more years of “getting into good trouble” — as Lewis put it — were still in the works. The broad outline of his story is well known:

• The son of sharecroppers whose family called him “the Preacher” for his childhood eulogies to fallen birds, he grew up alternating between school and picking cotton and peanuts.
• In 1958 at the age of 18, he wrote to his hero, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. about his aspirations for moral leadership. King reciprocated with a bus ticket to visit him in Atlanta.
• Lewis’ first arrest came in 1960 at the lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville. In 1961, he was among the 13 original Freedom Riders, black and white, who challenged the unrepentant heart of the Jim Crow South, to integrate interstate bus travel.
• He was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
• He was a youth organizer of 1963’s Million Man March on Washington where, like Reverend King, he inspired and challenged the throng of over 200,000 with his own stirring words:

“By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers . . . we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say: ‘Wake up, America. Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”

• At the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. in 1965, television images of his brutalization by state troopers galvanized a horrified nation behind the passage of the Voting Rights Act that ultimately transformed the South.
• There were some firebrands in SNCC who were suspicious of Lewis’ commitment to “getting into good trouble.” In 1966, they replaced him as chairman with Black Nationalist Stokely Carmichael.
• Lewis fought the good fight through the remainder of the civil rights movement and beyond. In 1986, in an upset victory, he won a Democratic primary in Atlanta over Julian Bond for election to the U.S. House, where he served for over three decades as “the conscience of the Congress.”

“I’ve always felt an affinity with the Jewish community,” Lewis wrote in his autobiography. Growing up in rural Troy,  “I heard many white people pronounced the word ‘Jew’ in the same way they used the term ‘nigger’. They would spit the word out like a bad piece of food. . .. I grew up studying Bible stories about the Jewish people. I felt a kinship with the children of Israel. I could see that their struggle was very similar to ours.”

For American Jews, Lewis was an African American Joshua following in Reverend King’s lead.

In 1996, despite sharing many of the goals of that year’s Million Man March, Lewis refused to attend because his motivation was “my conscience not my complexion,” and he could not endorse the leadership of march organizer and longtime anti-Semite, Minister Louis Farrakhan. In 1998, Lewis issued a clarion call to America that rings as true today as then:

“The rise of a man like Louis Farrakhan speaks to both the hunger of the people of this nation to be led as well as the lack of leaders to step in and fill that role. It’s not just black people, but whites as well who are looking for a human symbol, who are hungry for heroes. There’s a need there.”

Lewis died hoping that the peaceful, multiracial demonstrations by young people protesting the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman might provide a spark for new leadership. It will be up to all of us of all races, faiths and political persuasions — young and old — to embrace his clarion call to follow his lead and “getting into good trouble.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier is founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean and global social action director.