![]() ![]() ![]() In addition, there was the fear of losing their jobs or being evicted from the farms – John Lewis family heard stories about people in West Tennessee being evicted for those reasons. Lewis recalls that overtime his mother, father, grandfather, or relatives would try to register to vote, but would fail because they could not pass the literacy test. But more than anything, many African-Americans did not support the civil rights movement mostly because of fear. He says, “it’s not hard to understand at all the mixture of fear and concern they both felt as they watched me walk out into the world as a young man and join a movement aimed, in essence, at turning the world they knew upside down”. Lewis says that any change in his parent’s world was “usually for the worse”. This was the world that he was born in and within his world there was little room for change. ![]() Similar to the orderly cotton plants planted on the farm, Lewis thought that the community around him fell in order and took whatever the Jim Crow segregation law had to offer (or in this case, not offer). John Lewis grew up knowing that he was different from his family. Through all the threats, beatings, taunts, arrests, and injustice, John Lewis describes in his memoir, Walking with the Wind, how he challenged a system that was injustice and helped people of race to achieve their full potential, becoming one of the most well-known heroes in the Civil Rights Movement. John Lewis embarked on this peaceful protest and strode into the forefront of the civil rights movement partaking in the lunch counter sit ins, Freedom Rides, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Bloody Sunday in Selma, and the March to Montgomery. Growing up knowing he was different from his cotton farming family, John Lewis left his Alabama home and went to Nashville to study at a Baptist college, where his life and the civil rights movement became inexorably entwined. For a boy who grew up in the cotton farms of Alabama, to now a sixth-term United States Congressman, John Lewis led an extraordinary life that helped changed American history. ![]()
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