The death of John Lewis, one of America’s great remaining civil rights heroes to his peoples, ends a life devoted to freeing black people from the shackles of racism and hate.
He was beaten severely and repeatedly until he was bloody by angry whites as a young man leading the civil rights movement during the 1960’s.
All he wanted to do was to walk over a bridge, or sit on a bus, or eat at a lunch counter or to enter a public library where whites ruling the roost down South said he had no right to do.
When that era passed, and with Martin Luther King already gone, he got himself elected to Congress where he became a giant of a man, and someone to be dealt with and to be listened to, and to be emulated.
Mind you, his sacrifices didn’t end racism.
But they ended segregation in its harshest manifestations.
He became one of the most liberal members of the House. He was against the Iraq War.
When he switched sides from Hillary Clinton to Barack
Obama in the Democratic primary in 2008, that represented a seminal moment in the history of the nation.
Obama became the first and only black man ever elected pres- ident.
A powerful force for what is right and just has been lost.
The lesson we all can learn from his life is that one must fight for their freedom and for what is just and right.
When that fight is done, and the haters have been vanquished, then comes the hard part – recreating life from life.
He was the real thing – a man through and through. We shall not see his likes again.