At fifteen John Lewis wrote a letter to Dr. King saying he wanted to integrate the high school in Troy. Dr. King called him “the boy from Troy.” Washing dishes at American Baptist Seminary in Nashville, he studied nonviolence, the way of Gandhi and Thoreau with Reverend James Lawson. By 1963 he had been arrested forty times. When, in the summer of 1962, I first saw him sitting in the corner of a small church in Cairo, Illinois, I knew who he was. John Lewis was a Freedom Rider.
Source : My Friend John Lewis
