Speaking Volumes | ‘Good trouble.’ Remember civil rights icon at the Manatee County Library

Born this day, Feb. 21, 1940, in rural Troy, Alabama, Congressman John Lewis had no idea that his life’s journey would lead him to not only that bridge bloodied in Selma on Bloody Sunday, but also to Washington, DC as both a March on Washington speaker and a U. S. Congressman.

While he was raised in segregation under Jim Crow laws, he and others would recognize a need to end discrimination immediately. For his efforts, he would earn the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2001 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by President Barack Obama in 2011.

The “boy from Troy,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call him, imagined himself a preacher and practiced sermons in his family’s barn, his congregation all baby chicks. As a teen, he was inspired by hearing King speak on the radio, and his quest for education and elevation would lead him to Nashville. Lewis and other students would attend nonviolent confrontation workshops to prepare for lunch counter sit-ins, voter registration lines, and, unknowingly, to join the Freedom Riders.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Lewis would be beaten, shot at, arrested, imprisoned, and degraded, but he always refused to pressed charges and to be violent in return. This was nonviolent confrontation. Lewis was representative of two counter-intuitive truths of progress: nonviolent confrontation works, and the path of progress is bloody and dangerous.

Their efforts desegregated Nashville lunch counters and interstate bus travel, increased Black voter registrations, and lead directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1986, Lewis was elected to Congress to represent Georgia’s 5th District, a seat he would be reelected to until his death in 2020.

With your Manatee County Library card, you can explore Lewis’s legacy in multiple formats. For the full picture of the Freedom Riders, including interviews with riders, government elected officials, bystanders, and more watch PBS documentary, “Freedom Riders.” To see what kind of trouble Lewis got into his whole life, including 40 arrests, watch biopic “John Lewis: Good Trouble.”

The Civil Rights Movement was deeply organized and moved forward by a profound commitment from many. To gain inspiration from Lewis’s continued efforts, read his book “Across that Bridge.”It holds advice and lessons from his decades of experience, practical and uplifting, illuminating and comforting.

Another memoir called “Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” by John Lewis can also provide further insight, along with a new biography called “His Truth is Marching On,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham.

But perhaps my favorites are the “March” trilogy, three graphic novels that follow John Lewis’s activism and President Obama’s inauguration. Written by Lewis and his aide Andrew Aydin, with Nate Powell’s illustrations, this award-winning trilogy is a perfect introduction to his experiences. The third book won numerous awards, including the 2017 Michael L. Printz Award, Coretta Scott King Book Award, and the 2016 National Book Award Winner for Young People’s Literature.

Your library is online: www.mymanatee.org/library. Free masks are available at all library locations. Manatee Libraries is fine free! Please note that lost/damaged fee still apply.

Speaking Volumes is written by staff members at the Manatee County Public Library System. Olivia Tooker is an assistant at the Braden River Library.