As a teen, John Lewis wrote to Martin Luther King Jr. during a budding civil rights movement. In a letter back, King invited him to join the cause — and included a round-trip bus ticket to Montgomery. Lewis recounted that first meeting on StoryCorps:
So, when he graduated from high school two years later, Lewis wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr., who at the time was a young minister from Atlanta sowing the seeds of the civil rights movement.
Not only did King write back to Lewis, he also included in the letter a round-trip bus ticket to Montgomery and an invitation to meet him, which Lewis eventually did — in March 1958. At 18, Lewis traveled 50 miles from Troy to Montgomery by Greyhound. Fred Gray, the lawyer to King and Rosa Parks, picked him up from the bus station and drove him to the city's First Baptist Church —"I was so scared. I didn't know what to say or what to do," Lewis recalled."And Dr. King said, 'Are you the boy from Troy?'
"And I said, 'Dr. King, I am John Robert Lewis.' I gave my whole name. But he still called me the 'boy from Troy,'"he said."I guess in the end we knew and realized that we changed things," Lewis said. "My philosophy is very simple: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to stand up, you have to say something, you have to do something.""But I told her that I got into a good trouble, necessary trouble," he said."Even today, I tell people, 'We need to get in good trouble.'"while he undergoes treatment for stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
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