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For John Lewis it was always a “good trouble” – and still is today

BJ Hollars
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In the spring of 1961, hundreds of black and white Americans applied to participate in the Freedom Rides, a bus trip from Washington, DC to New Orleans sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. The goal of the trip was to test two Supreme Court rulings that had declared racial segregation between states unconstitutional. Although the trip would prove dangerous, the risk involved did little to deter the applicants, including a future congressman named John Lewis.

After filling out the required information on the front of the Freedom Rides CORE application, 21-year-old Lewis did what other applicants didn't. He turned the application over and wrote an unsolicited personal statement that gives us our first glimpse into Lewis' lifelong commitment to social justice.

“I am in my last year at the American Baptist Theological Seminary,” Lewis wrote with a shaking hand. “I hope to graduate in June, but [other] Hand Freedom Ride is much more of [a] “I know an education is important, and I hope to get one,” he continued, “but right now human dignity is the most important thing in my life. I have chosen to give up everything if it takes Freedom Ride to bring justice and freedom to the Deep South.”

When I stumbled upon Lewis' application for the Freedom Rides in an archive folder in 2015, I was astonished by his clarity of purpose. By the age of 21, Lewis had already dedicated his life to “good anger” – long before he had even coined the term.

He had to pay with pain for the next six decades.

On May 20, 1961, he was beaten by a mob at the Montgomery Greyhound station. Four years later, on March 7, 1965, his skull was fractured with a police officer's baton on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. In the years before and after, Lewis was arrested no less than 40 times – time and again his freedom was taken away from him in an effort to end racial segregation.

Lewis was not a fan of anger, but he welcomed it when it came. For anger allowed him to practice nonviolence in public and demonstrate its power to the world. He experienced it while sitting at a lunch counter, on a bus, and outside a segregated restroom in a bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He was punched, kicked, and handcuffed, but remained steadfast in his belief that nonviolence was “love at its best.”

It's no surprise, then, that John Lewis' statue, unveiled last Saturday outside the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Alabama, depicts him with his hands on his heart, radiating his love outward. It will likely serve for generations to come as a larger-than-life reminder of the connection between love and “good trouble.”

In an opinion piece published in July 2020, just weeks after his death, the late congressman made one final call for “good anger” to “save the soul of the nation.” Indeed, that summer, our nation seemed to be falling apart on all sides—politically, racially, and ravaged by a virus for which there was no vaccine. Even then, John Lewis, for whom “human dignity” was everything, did not give up hope.

“In my life I have done everything to show that the way of peace, the way of love and non-violence is the better way,” Lewis wrote in his last piece.

Even four years after his death, John Lewis still occasionally gets into “good trouble.”

His statue stands where a Confederate obelisk once stood firmly rooted in the Georgian soil for over a hundred years.

BJ Hollars is an author, professor, and award-winning columnist from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is the author of several books, including The Road South: Personal Stories of the Freedom Riders (from which this research comes), Wisconsin for Kennedy: The Primary That Launched A President and Changed The Course of History, and others. In addition, his work has appeared in the Washington Post, NPR, Parents Magazine, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Millions, and elsewhere.

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