{"id":2476,"date":"2021-11-23T13:33:30","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T17:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/?p=2476"},"modified":"2022-01-12T14:21:42","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T18:21:42","slug":"good-trouble-necessary-trouble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/good-trouble-necessary-trouble\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018good trouble, necessary trouble\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Congressman<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Congressman John Lewis relied on no formal remarks when he delivered the commencement address May 16, 2014 at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn\u2019t need to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis had a life rich and full of experiences carefully catalogued in his head that a half-century earlier took its share of beatings by police and anti-civil rights vigilantes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was not his first time in Princess Anne to engage with local college students. As chairman of the national Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the 24-year-old Lewis visited in late February 1964 to investigate highly publicized clashes between police and Maryland State students protesting local restaurants that refused to serve Blacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

News accounts described officers employing dogs, fire hoses and clubs to break up the demonstrations. Lewis was quoted as blaming \u201cstate police\u201d for instigating violence that sent some students to the hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis was one of the faces of the mid-20th century\u2019s civil rights movement alongside the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a mentor he noted had also been Maryland State\u2019s commencement speaker<\/a> (in 1959).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 7, 1965, Lewis found himself face-to-face with stick-wielding police when he and fellow activists attempted to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala. in a peaceful march to protest vote law inequities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Network television cameras and newspaper photographers captured a gut-wrenching scene that showed Lewis, wearing a trench coat and backpack, enduring a brutal beating from police. The confrontation shocked the country, and shamed Congress into enacting the 1965 Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf someone had told me when we were walking across that bridge in Selma \u2013 left beaten, left bloody and unconscious \u2013 that one day I would live to see a man of color as president of the United States,\u201d Lewis told the class of 2014, \u201cI would have said \u2018you must be crazy, you must be out of your mind\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"1962<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Those in the Hytche center audience old enough to remember sat transfixed. Some nodded in agreement. Others looked down, perhaps reflecting on similar experiences they knew about \u2013 or had themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFind a way to get in trouble \u2013 good trouble, necessary trouble,\u201d Lewis said. \u201cMake our country what our country should be, and help change the world. You can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first installment of a critically acclaimed graphic novel series that told Lewis\u2019 life story in comic book-style was published in August 2013. \u201cMarch\u201d was aimed at young readers who might not fully grasp the importance of the civil rights struggle. UMES graduates and platform guests received a complimentary copy that day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis talked about growing up in the segregated South on a sharecropper\u2019s farm where as a youngster he preached to chickens, one of his signature anecdotes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m convinced that some of those chickens that I preached to in the \u201940s and the \u201950s tended to listen to me much better than some of my colleagues listen to me in the Congress,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd some of those chickens were a little more productive. At least they produced eggs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being barred from his town\u2019s library because of the color of his skin and relegated to sitting in the balcony of the local movie theater inspired an adolescent Lewis to choose fighting for civil rights as his life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve to get up, speak up, speak out and move your feet,\u201d he said. \u201cThe world is waiting for you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lewis also spoke of forgiveness. Elwin Wilson, a former Ku Klux Klansman who had beaten him during a 1961 \u201cFreedom Ride\u201d protest, went to see Lewis in February 2009. Wilson\u2019s son accompanied him. (Wilson died in 2013)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWill you forgive me?,\u201d Lewis said Wilson asked. \u201cHis son started crying. He started crying. I started crying. He called me \u2018brother.\u2019 I called him \u2018brother.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSomeplace along the way, if we get it right here in America, we lay down the burden of the vision of separation,\u201d he said. \u201cWe can create the beloved community, and be a model for the rest of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like most gifted commencement speakers, Lewis challenged his audience that historic spring day at UMES.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGo out there and fight the good fight,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd never, ever give up. Be bold. Be courageous. And find a way to get in the way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Lewis died July 17, 2020; the nation reflected on the civil rights icon\u2019s inspirational life story that he drew from during his 14-minute commencement address<\/em> to the class of 2014<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Congressman John Lewis relied on no formal remarks when he delivered the commencement address May 16, 2014 at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. He didn\u2019t need to. Lewis had a life rich and full of experiences carefully catalogued in his head that a half-century earlier took its share of beatings by police and anti-civil…Read more \u2018good trouble, necessary trouble\u2019<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1182,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-2476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2476"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwcp.umes.edu\/125\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=2476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}