“I remember the day started out cold,” Representative John Lewis told me of the day he set out to march across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. “Cold enough to see our breath as we walked.”Representative John Lewis just outside the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama.
Fifty years earlier, a young Lewis, then chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee , had knelt in prayer with some 600 courageous black folk before embarking on that fateful march. I'd asked him what he remembered. There is only one monument that can begin to acknowledge the sacrifices and successes of this most courageous legislator of our age: restoration of voting rights by immediate passage of theI was accustomed to engaging guests with lighthearted banter during commercials while filming my cable news show, but nothing about standing next to John Lewis in Selma felt lighthearted.
was brutally beaten by one of the 150 Alabama state troopers who attacked the peaceful voting rights demonstrators with clubs, bullwhips, and tear gasI’ve seen the historic image many times—Lewis’ on his knees, his right hand covering the first wound to his head, the state trooper holding the collar of Lewis’ trench coat, club raised to strike another blow. I never wondered why he was wearing a long coat on a spring morning in Alabama. Now I knew: Lewis was cold.
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