Civil rights icon John Lewis remembered in his hometown
Source: AP
By KIM CHANDLER
TROY, Ala. (AP) — Civil rights icon and longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis was remembered Saturday — in the rural Alabama county where his story began — as a humble man who sprang from his family’s farm with a vision that “good trouble” could change the world.
The morning service in the city of Troy in rural Pike County was held at Troy University, where Lewis would often playfully remind the chancellor that he was denied admission in 1957 because he was Black, and where decades later he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
Lewis, who became a civil rights icon and a longtime Georgia congressman, died July 17 at the age of 80.
Saturday morning’s service was titled “The Boy from Troy,” the nickname the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave Lewis at their first meeting in 1958 in Montgomery. King had sent the 18-year-old Lewis a round-trip bus ticket because Lewis was interested in trying to attend what was then an all-white university in Troy, just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from his family’s farm in Pike County.
Fraternity members sing in front of the casket of the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., during a service celebrating "The Boy from Troy" at Troy University on Saturday, July 25, 2020, in Troy, Ala. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)
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If anyone ever earned it, John Lewis did.
