John Lewis: Photos From a Life Spent Getting Into Good Trouble

[douglas9]

The civil-rights icon and longtime U.S. representative John Lewis died yesterday at the age of 80. Lewis began his life as the son of an Alabama sharecropper, and became active in the civil-rights movement while he was a student in Nashville, Tennessee. Lewis became nationally known after the March 7, 1965, “Bloody Sunday” march to Montgomery, Alabama, when he and dozens of other marchers were brutally beaten after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. In 1986, Lewis was elected to the House of Representatives, where he served his constituents from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District until his death. President Barack Obama wrote of Lewis: “He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise.” During a commencement address in 2016, Lewis told Bates College graduates how he had been inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. to “get into trouble, good trouble,” and advised them that “you must find a way to get in the way and get in good trouble, necessary trouble … You have a moral obligation, a mission, and a mandate, when you leave here, to go out and seek justice for all. You can do it. You must do it.”

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https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/07/john-lewis-photos-life-spent-getting-into-good-trouble/614368/

[ret5hd]

1. Does this make anyone else contemplate the selfish and wasteful battles...

on which most of us tend to waste our energies?

I will try to do better.

[Ninga]

2. Love this. Hits home. Begs the question to all of us. "Are you an upstander or bystander."

[irisblue]

3. This image is not in the article

Link to tweet

[qwlauren35]

4. The thing I admire about him

Is that he didn't stop. Up until his death, he was standing, marching, protesting, fighting, getting in Good Trouble.

Rest in Peace.

[irisblue]

5. Amen. 🕯️

[GeoWilliam750]

6. Many thanks

To this wonderfully courageous and righteous man.

And as one wise man said, oh so long ago:

"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."