John Lewis: Good Trouble

Abstract

Very few members of the U.S. Congress ever posted so flagrantly lawless a set of credentials as John Lewis (1940–2020). His rap sheet included over three dozen arrests, all of them for conduct that entailed civil disobedience. In choosing so frequently to honor the claims of conscience over the rule of law, he organized his life around the same dilemma that Mark Twain's most famous character faced; and—in this respect only—Representative Lewis should be regarded as the Huck Finn of American politics. Having gone from making trouble to making laws, this protestor-turned-politician is long overdue for a documentary that would set his life in context. Having personified the heroic phase of the civil rights movement, Lewis carried his own history with him—from the Nashville sit-ins of 1960 to the freedom rides the following year, from the one-sided battle in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a Confederate general...