A Reflection of Love: Remembering Congressman John Lewis

In 1961 a 21 year old John Lewis embarked on the journey to challenge segregation in the transportation industry by becoming a Freedom Rider. The Freedom Riders were a group of diverse students from all racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds who traveled from DC through the South on a Greyhound bus defying segregation laws. The journey was considered so dangerous, that US attorney general Bobby Kennedy implored the organizer to reconsider, to which she replied, “we’ve all written our Wills.”

When the bus stopped in South Carolina, they were met with their first round of violence that left John Lewis bloody and beaten. Having been trained prior to the trip to withstand beatings with passive resistance, he did not fight back.

Forty eight years later, Congressman John Lewis was visited in his Washington chamber office by the former klansman whose hands had beaten Lewis at the Greyhound terminal. The man apologized.

John Lewis’s passive reflection of love at the the Klansman’s hatred had haunted him. The men embraced.

This is what I will forever remember about John Lewis’s legacy. As we get older, it seems wisdom brings new understandings. People can change. If we are to learn anything from John Lewis’s life, it’s that responding with love to someone else’s hatred is truly the only way to change someone’s heart.