In the rural Alabama county where he was born, civil rights leader and longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis was remembered on Saturday as a humble man who sprang from his family’s farm with a vision that “good trouble” could change the world.
The morning service in Pike county was held at Troy University, where Lewis would often remind the chancellor that he was denied admission in 1957 because he was black, and where decades later he was awarded an honorary doctorate.
Lewis died on 17 July at the age of 80.
Saturday morning’s service was titled The Boy from Troy, the nickname the Rev Martin Luther King Jr gave Lewis at their first meeting, in Montgomery in 1958. King sent the 18-year-old Lewis a round-trip bus ticket because Lewis was interested in trying to attend what was then an all-white university in Troy, 10 miles from his family’s farm.
On Sunday, Lewis’s flag-draped casket will be carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where the one-time Freedom…
