" Good Trouble" By Jon Weinstein

Today, a simple hearse met a United States Air Force plane at Joint Base Andrews bearing the body of a man born eighty years ago to impoverished sharecroppers deep in the heart of Jim Crow Alabama.

The man was borne to the United States Capitol making stops at central monuments to the African-American experience in America along the route. His hearse stopped at the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps the planet’s boldest, simplest monument to human freedom ever elected. This man, born to basically illiterate, oppressed people who toiled all of their lives in a manner little different from the outright slavery of their grandparents and generations before them, once spoke there calling his country to justice; he spoke of the oppression of fellow Americans, and their illegal denial of a right to vote. He was twenty-three years old.

Later on, this man, at the age of 25, valiantly defied some of the most vicious law enforcement and empowered citizenry armed to disperse and harm them ever assembled in this country to cross a bridge on a march for basic voting rights. He was struck in the head by a soda create. His skull lie open and exposed, bleeding profusely. The man did not die. He intensified his efforts to expand and protect the rights of others. Later, he was elected to serve in the United States House of Representatives.

When he left his home in rural Alabama to attend an all-black biblical college in Tennessee, his parents warned him: do not get into trouble. Do not get arrested. Do not jeopardize yourself. Shortly, the young man defied those warnings. He did so only to force a segregated society to allow his people to eat as simple equals at a public lunch counter. When he was admonished and virtually shunned by his parents for his first arrest, he replied that he sought” good trouble”.

“ Good Trouble”: The trouble that causes the brave actor trying to change something rotten to suffer loss of freedom and grievous bodily injury or death in order to achieve something very good.

Today, eighty years after his birth in Jim Crow America where African-Americans in Alabama and many other places enjoyed no civil, legal, political, economic and social protections, a military honor guard bore that man’s remains to the Rotunda of the United States Capitol.

Tomorrow, this man’s remains will lie in the Capitol of the state of Alabama—to the same city of Montgomery that was the capstone of this man and his colleagues’ violent, bloody, painful struggle designed merely to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Tomorrow, a white , conservative Republican Governor of Alabama will welcome this man’s remains to the capitol that she presides over. This was the capitol of Folsom and Wallace and countless other racists who ruled there. This is the capital of the once feudal land of legalized Black slavery and oppression.

 In the nation’s Capitol Rotunda: In this hallowed place in our country, this simple man who literally give himself into grave danger even before being cracked in the skull at the Edmund G. Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on that “ Bloody Sunday”, 1965, now lies in state—the first African-American ever to do so—in the same place where Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson lay.

Today’s service, for me, was the closure, in some but not all respects, of an important part of the American Experience. Serving and laying to rest in a building dedicated to representative government that was largely built by slaves, a man who had to risk his life to ride busses, eat at lunch counters and vote time and time again finally is accorded a state funeral there. We can grow. We can change.

Bigotry and racism is not gone. The position of America’s African -Americans is not suddenly exalted and redeemed by today’s act. Not by a long shot. But who could ever have imagined from that dark day in 1965 that someone who led that brave, frightful battle march for freedom would become an influential and bipartisan figure of respect as a Member of Congress? Certainly not the many men who’s images are still honored in that same building only yards away for their segregationist, secessionist pasts. Certainly not for those who resisted civil rights throughout our history , but are still celebrated in that building.

In the same building that housed portraits of John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay and Richard Russell and J. William Fulbright and others who resisted basic civil rights, an act of closure of sorts occurred today in that Rotunda.

It was an incredible day; today, something excellent, moral, dedicated, and truthful happened. Today, America celebrated in the Congress the life of an American son of the south, warrior for freedom, Member of Congress, and patriotic, singular American hero : Robert John Lewis, 1940-2020.