Flower petals lie on the Edmund Pettus Bridge ahead of Rep. John Lewis’ casket crossing during a memorial service for him Sunday, July 26, 2020, in Selma, Alabama.
John Lewis died on Friday from complications due to pancreatic cancer, an illness that divided the last few months of his life into “good days and days not so good,” as he recently told me. He’d seen a lot in his 80 years — from a modest youth as the third of ten children in an Alabama sharecropping family, to a brutal and exhilarating early adulthood in the civil-rights movement, to his storied tenure in Congress, where he represented Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District from 1987 until his death.
His later years were marked by novelty, much of it lamentable: the election of Donald Trump, who he believed was the worst president for civil rights in his lifetime, and his cancer diagnosis in December, less than a year before he had a chance to see Trump voted out of office. Neither the ups nor the downs much swayed his sense of optimism. Even its most recent test — the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the protests, rioting, and often violent police crackdown that followed — engendered in Lewis abundant cause for hope.
Just over a month before his death, Lewis spoke to New York about why he’d stayed the course for so long, even as timeworn political strategies seemed inadequate to fixing urgent social problems, and he openly feared waking up one day to find that American democracy had disappeared. This instinct to be vigilant, but stubbornly hopeful, was, for many, among his most inspiring traits. He remains in death an example of what can be won if one is willing to make, in his words, “good trouble.”
honestly fucks me up that when ppl see me, my face goes through the filter of their perception (curated by their very specific life experiences n their unique point of view). basically if i truly saw myself with someone else’s brain, i probably wouldn’t realize who i was looking at. my eyes don’t mean the same to others as they do to me. everyone reads each other in a new way and it’s so uncontrollable
Italy, Alberobello, 1963. Countryside covered with Trulli houses, they are modelled after the houses built by the Moors when they occupied this area, Burt Glinn.
