Remembering John Lewis: 'Good Trouble'

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“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America,” John Lewis declared on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 1, 2020, commemorating Bloody Sunday. On March 7, 1965, peaceful protesters were beaten by law enforcement for crossing the bridge. Lewis and others, like Amelia Boynton Robinson, were so badly beaten they were hospitalized.  The 600-person march protested police brutality, sparked by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper. Despite the March on Washington a year and a half earlier, little had changed for Black Americans. Bloody Sunday was depicted in Ava Duvernay’s film Selma, with John Legend and Common winning an Oscar for the song “Glory.” This event is a pinnacle of Lewis’ life, teaching us five lessons about getting in good trouble.

Vote, always: “Your vote matters. If it didn’t, why would some people keep trying to take it away? #goodtrouble,” Lewis tweeted on July 3, 2018, emphasizing his lifelong commitment to equitable voting rights.

Civil rights leader and longtime US congressman John Lewis spent his life fighting for freedom and justice for everyone. In this illuminating conversation with lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, Lewis discusses the essential importance of voting, shares encouraging words of wisdom for the generation of young people currently organizing in the struggle for racial justice and tells moving stories from his decades of making "good trouble" -- at the Freedom Rides, March on Washington and in the halls of Congress. "When you see something that's not right or fair or just, you have to say something," Lewis says. "You have to do something." (This conversation is part of the TED Legacy Project. Recorded November 19, 2019)  

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