By 18, Lewis was looking to go to college, and the Rev. King himself summoned “the boy from Troy,” hoping to enlist young John in his efforts to integrate the halls of Southern academia. Although Lewis declined that offer, he would help head up the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and began leading protests, lunch-counter sit-ins and symbolic bus rides till he found himself, at age 23, on the bill for the 1963 March on Washington — the youngest speaker on the dais on that historic day, ahead of King himself.
Dr. King, of course, would deliver his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech on that occasion, amid the summer swelter. And shortly after, Rep. Lewis has told me, President Kennedy welcomed the day’s leaders to the White House and shook each man’s hand, saying: “You did a good job. You did a good job.” And when Kennedy got to King, he said, “And you had a dream.”
Young Lewis often had occasion to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with King as they, with other leaders and volunteers, bore the load and shared the sense of mission in securing civil rights against the hot flames of pure prejudice.
Lewis led the way on that infamous day near Selma, in March of 1965, when hundreds of protestors marched peacefully across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, only to be beaten and bludgeoned and teargassed by state troopers.
John Lewis, knocked unconscious, thought he was going to die that day. But he lived to march again in Alabama, this time with the Rev. King present, as brothers in arms interlocked, helping to prompt that year’s passage of the Voting Rights Act. And last year, upon the infamous event’s 50th anniversary, Rep. Lewis, ever called to history’s front lines, walked with President Obama and others to the foot of that symbolic Pettus Bridge.
King was assassinated nearly a half-century ago now. But fellow heroes like Congressman Lewis — his brother in soaring oratory, now the last of the civil rights movement’s “Big 6” — continue to preach “the ways of love, the ways of nonviolence.”
A nation struggles still where the dream has fallen short, and mourns the casualties that mount still before we can get to the promised land.
In today’s socially roiling climate, Rep. Lewis is writing the last graphic-novel book in his civil-rights memoir, “March,” alongside co-author Andrew Aydin. I asked the trilogy’s artist, Nate Powell, what this amazing journey has been like, as the three men carry these historic messages to young and hungry audiences.
“I certainly feel an emotional high when we speak and listen before a few thousand people, but I try not to confuse that sense of momentum with the actual [historic] momentum carried by our books,” Powell, a Southern-born cartoonist now based in Indiana, tells me. “More than anything, we’re all excited to see ‘March’ as tools to help facilitate all kinds of discussions relevant to [now], and as a jumping point for new ideas and action.”
” ‘March’ has been life-changing for me,” Powell adds, “and as a parent raising two young children into this world, I’m trying to create something that will help them feel connected and empowered to make a difference in the world they will inherit.”
The other day, I met with Rep. Lewis in his House Cannon Building office, and the room is a visual testament to the struggles and successes of a life devoted to a dream. I stare at Selma maps, and Lewis’s ’60s police mug shot, and I recite again the moral conviction: Let today’s ignorance and resistance and intolerance not diminish the dream.
The journey is uphill, and in the spirit of King himself, Rep. John Lewis — still a role model for us all at 75 — keeps striding upward, and forward. For that is the only method to ascending this promised American mountain.
Happy Martin Luther King Day.


