Representative John Lewis (D–GA)—the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, the last surviving member of the iconic Big Six and current congressman for Georgia’s fifth congressional district —credits his success as a civil rights leader to his willingness to get into “good, necessary trouble.” At two events this Tuesday, March 31, the Congressman, joined on stage by his March co-author Andrew Aydin, shared how his childhood in rural Alabama informed his pioneering work for civil rights.

Representative John Lewis urged Chicago Ideas attendees to “get in the way” and get into “good, necessary trouble.”
Photo Credit: Tim Klein/Chicago Ideas

The first event, held at King College Prep High School in Kenwood and co-organized by CPS and Chicago Ideas, gave the magnet school’s senior class an inside look at the importance of “get[ting] in the way to make our country and our world a better place,” as Rep. Lewis framed it. Later that evening, Lewis and Aydin further delved into the importance of the principles of nonviolent protest in today’s sociopolitical climate at a Chicago Ideas Conversation at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Aydin, who serves as the Congressman’s digital director and policy advisor and has been Rep. Lewis’s “constituent since he was three years old,” discussed how he and the Congressman hope their graphic novel trilogy, March, will inspire a new generation of civil rights leaders. When the two first started the project—a project that, Aydin admitted, others initially considered “ridiculous”—they “were out to do more than write a book.” Since March: Book One’s publication in 2013, the graphic novel has been taught in schools across 40 states, spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and become the only comic book to be awarded a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin signed books after the Chicago Ideas Conversation.
Photo Credit: Tim Klein/Chicago Ideas

At the conclusion of a day that began at Martin Luther King College Prep and ended in front of a rapt audience that included CIW YOU(th), Lewis reflected on his mentor from the Chicago Ideas stage: “If it hadn’t been for Martin Luther King, I don’t know what I would have done today. He freed me, he liberated me and he made me the person I am today.”