John Lewis Documentary: The Trailer
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copyright, Spider Martin
Long before Barack Obama’s birth, John Lewis worked the cotton fields in Pike County, Alabama where he grew up as the son of sharecroppers. While attending segregated schools, he heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King on the radio and for the first time in his life, he discovered the dream of a more just and equitable world. Dr. King's message so inspired young Lewis that over they years he has become one of the most public advocates and practitioners of the philosophy of nonviolence.
As a college student, Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville. As a Freedom Rider, he rode through the south in a drive to test recently enacted interstate desegregation laws. These nonviolent campaigns, along with his leadership in voter registration campaigns throughout the south, earned him dozens of attacks and beatings, arrests and imprisonment. By the time he reached Washington D.C. in August 1963, he was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a seasoned civil rights activist. At 23 years old, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington, he represented students like himself, the unsung foot soldiers at the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement.
Since 1987, Lewis has put his beliefs into practice as a highly effective U.S. Congressman representing Georgia’s 5th district, Atlanta. Humble, persistent, thoughtful - an idealist and a realist at the same time - he is a rare voice on Capitol Hill: a politician with a vision of nonviolent social change. Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, he praised Representative Lewis as "The President's Hero."
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