The body of Rep. John Lewis is lying in state today at the US Capitol in Washington, DC as lawmakers and the public pay their respects. According to congressional historians, he is the first Black lawmaker to lie in state at the US Capitol Rotunda.
As I noted following Rep. Lewis’s death, his original intention was to become a preacher. As a boy, he was responsible for taking care of the chickens on the family farm. He fed them and read to them from the Bible, baptized them when they were born, and staged funerals for them when they died. As he noted in his memoir, “I could imagine that they were my congregation. And me, I was the preacher.”
Rep. Lewis dedicated his life to civil rights as an expression of his faith and call to ministry. He was by no means alone.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of himself, “In the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.” It has been noted that “the Black church served as the center for the civil rights movement in the South in both logistical and symbolic ways.” Catholic activists were prominently involved in the Selma demonstrations of March 1965 that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
One writer describes the civil rights movement’s leaders this way: “They were pastors who rose up to confront a powerful segregationist establishment and face down violent mobs. Their steel will, backed by thousands of followers inspired by their faith [in] nonviolent resistance, broke the back of unjust segregation laws and set in motion the transformation of America into a more racially tolerant nation.”
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