Hon. Bro. John Lewis | Sigma Sigma Sigma Chapter

Hon. Bro. John Lewis was John Robert Lewis was born close to Troy, Alabama, on February 21, 1940, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama, of which Troy was the county seat.[ His great-grandfather, Frank Carter, had been born a slave in the same county in 1862, and lived until Lewis was seven years old.

As a boy, Lewis aspired to be a preacher, and at age five, he preached to his family's chickens on the farm. As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people, as his county was majority black by a large percentage and his family worked as farmers. By the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. When Lewis was 11, an uncle took him to Buffalo, New York, where he became acutely aware of the contrast with Troy's segregation.

In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio, and he closely followed King's Montgomery bus boycott later that year. At age 15, Lewis preached his first public sermon. At 17, Lewis met Rosa Parks, notable for her role in the bus boycott, and met King for the first time at the age of 18. In later years, Lewis also credited evangelist Billy Graham, a friend of King's, as someone who "helped change me".Lewis also stated that Graham inspired him "to a significant degree" to fulfill his aspirations of becoming a minister.

After writing to King about being denied admission to Troy University in Alabama, Lewis was invited to meet with him. King, who referred to Lewis as "the boy from Troy", discussed suing the university for discrimination, but he warned Lewis that doing so could endanger his family in Troy. After discussing it with his parents, Lewis decided instead to proceed with his education at a small, historically black college in Tennessee.

Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and was ordained as a Baptist minister. He then earned a bachelor's degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University, also a historically black college. He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.

As a student, Lewis became an activist in the civil rights movement. He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and took part in many other civil rights activities as part of the Nashville Student Movement. The Nashville sit-in movement was responsible for the desegregation of lunch counters in the city's downtown. Lewis was arrested and jailed many times during the nonviolent activities to desegregate the city's downtown businesses. He was also instrumental in organizing bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests to support voting rights and racial equality.

During this time, Lewis said it was important to engage in "good trouble, necessary trouble" in order to achieve change, and he held to this credo throughout his life.

While a student, Lewis was invited to attend nonviolence workshops held at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church by the Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith. Lewis and other students became dedicated to the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, which he practiced for the rest of his life.

In 1961, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. The group of seven blacks and six whites planned to ride on interstate buses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans to challenge the policies of Southern states along the route that had imposed segregated seating on the buses, which violated federal policy for interstate transportation. The "Freedom Ride", originated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and revived by James Farmer and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional. The Freedom Rides revealed the passivity of the local, state, and federal governments in the face of violence against law-abiding citizens. The project was publicized and organizers had notified the Department of Justice about it. It relied upon the Alabama police to protect the riders, even though the state was known for notorious racism, and did not undertake actions except assigning FBI agents to record incidents. After extreme violence broke out in South Carolina and Alabama, the Kennedy Administration called for a "cooling-off" period, with a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

In the South, Lewis and other nonviolent Freedom Riders were beaten by angry mobs and arrested. At age 21, Lewis was the first of the Freedom Riders to be assaulted while in Rock Hill, South Carolina. When he tried to enter a whites-only waiting room, two white men attacked him, injuring his face and kicking him in the ribs. Two weeks later Lewis joined a Freedom Ride bound for Jackson, Mississippi. As a result of his Freedom Rider activities, Lewis was imprisoned for 40 days in the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary in Sunflower County.

In an interview with CNN during the 40th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, Lewis recounted the violence he and the 12 other original Freedom Riders endured. In Birmingham, the Riders were beaten by an unrestrained mob including KKK members (notified of their arrival by police) with baseball bats, chains, lead pipes, and stones. The police arrested them, and led them across the border into Tennessee before letting them go. The Riders reorganized and rode to Montgomery, where they were met with more violence at the local Greyhound station. There Lewis was hit in the head with a wooden crate. "It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious", said Lewis, remembering the incident.

When CORE gave up on the Freedom Ride because of the violence, Lewis and fellow activist Diane Nash arranged for Nashville students from Fisk and other colleges to take it over and bring it to a successful conclusion.

In February 2009, 48 years after the Montgomery attack, Lewis received a nationally televised apology from Elwin Wilson, a white southerner and former Klansman.

Lewis wrote in 2015 that he had known the young activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman from New York. They, along with James Chaney, a local African-American activist from Mississippi, were abducted and murdered in June 1964 in Neshoba County, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan including law enforcement.

In 1998, he published his autobiography Walking With The Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.

Civil Right Walk of Fame, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Spingarn Medal, the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize.