We remember John Robert Lewis who died on July 17 at the age of 80 as an icon of the civil rights movement. A congressman who Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others have called the ‘moral conscience’ of the United States Congress.
It was Martin Luther King, Jr. who gave him the nickname, “The boy from Troy.” Lewis said when he first met him: “Dr. King said, ‘Are you the boy from Troy?
Are you John Lewis?’ And I said, ‘I am John Robert Lewis,’ I gave my whole name. And he still called me ‘the boy from Troy.’” That was 63 years ago in Montgomery, Ala., at King’s First Baptist Church.
Over the years we know how much John Lewis did to further the rights of African Americans in this country. He was president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating