Religious faith was a constant for Rep. John Lewis. He spent his boyhood in Alabama preaching to a congregation of chickens and siblings. He went on to be inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and to learn nonviolence protest tactics.
FILE - In this Friday, March 5, 1999, file photo, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., speaks with reporters in Washington. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020.
“He is the reason I come,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a longtime participant in the pilgrimages, said of Lewis during the 2019 tour, sponsored by the Faith and Politics Institute in Washington. “And I would start speaking or preaching. And when I look back, some of these chickens would bow their heads. Some of these chickens would shake their heads. They never quite said ‘Amen,’ but I’m convinced that some of those chickens that I preached to during the ’40s and the ’50s tended to listen to me much better than some of my colleagues listen to me today,” he said in an interview with C-SPAN in 2012.
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