John Lewis has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
United States · 1940–2020
Politics and public life
Served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia from 1987 until his death in 2020. Chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was one of the original Freedom Riders, and led the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where he was badly beaten.
16 answers
I wanted to know. I asked a lot of questions and she would say, "Read, read."…So she inspired me a great deal.
Jim Lawson. Jim Lawson was an unbelievable human being. Born in Ohio. He was a pacifist. He studied Gandhi. He was part of the Methodist Student Movement. He lived in India. He became an organizer for FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Buying art…. But it makes me happy!
My tendency to skip meals.
Barack Obama, because he believed he could be president of the United States, and he succeeded. He was kind, and he tried to set a high standard of leadership.
Participating in a transformative movement that advocated human dignity and changed America forever.
When I was growing up on a farm in rural Alabama, I fell in love with raising chickens. They seem truly innocent. Whenever I'm around chickens, I feel happy.
I don't want to die. I don't think I'm going to die…but we all have to die. Since I do, I hope I live on in the hearts and minds of people.
You must find a way to get in the way, you must find a way to get into trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble.
I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, 'Why?'. And they would say, 'That's the way it is. Don't get in the way, don't get in trouble!'
When I was growing up I wanted to be a minister. I wanted to preach.
As a participant in the movement, as I was sitting in, I came to that point where I lost all sense of fear.
On the Freedom Rides in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a state trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die.
More than anything else, I had to combat the barriers, and we tore down those barriers. I just had to set a sail against the wind, those strong winds, to end segregation and racial discrimination, but somehow, in some way, I didn’t let those barriers keep me down.
I never thought that we would fail or that I would fail. I knew from time to time we may make some blunders. We may make some mistakes, but we were not going to fail.
There are many battles. There’s so much that needs to be done. We need to protect the environment. Save this little planet. Not just this little piece of real estate we call America, but save the planet.
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