When the horse-drawn wagon carrying the body of Rep. John Lewis began to make its way up the Edmund Pettus Bridge, it felt like there was a stirring of the ancestors, those in that “great cloud of witnesses” whose spirits are ever with us and who were with a young John Lewis the day police officers nearly killed him for daring to march across the bridge as part of the work to get black people ...

July 17, 2020 Tonight, just before midnight, we heard the news that 80-year-old Georgia Representative John Lewis has passed away from pancreatic cancer. As a young adult, Lewis was a “troublemaker,” breaking the laws of his state: he broke the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington D.C. to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was ...

In April 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church, Dr. King delivered a sermon that offered a profound diagnosis of the illnesses afflicting the nation. King summoned the nation to “undergo a radical revolution of values” that would transform the United States “from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Only through such a revolution, he declared, would we be able to overcome “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”