John Lewis

Now we have black and white elected officials working together. Today, we have gone beyond just passing laws. Now we have to create a sense that we are one community, one family. Really, we are the American family.

Listening to Dr. King on the radio inspired me. Coming under the influence of Jim Lawson inspired me to think that I, too, could do something.

Early on, I wrote a letter to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was 17. I felt called, moved.

I never praised Mr. Snowden or said his actions rise to those of Mohandas Gandhi or other civil rights leaders.

The action of Rosa Parks, the words and leadership of Dr. King inspired me. I was deeply inspired. I wanted to do something.

We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.

My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.

Many young people, many children, are being abused, being put down, being bullied because of their sexual orientation.

The vote controls everything that you do.

You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.

If someone had told me in 1963 that one day I would be in Congress, I would have said, 'You're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about.'

Dr. King was one of the most inspiring human beings I ever met. He was such a warm, compassionate, and loving human being.

Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

Without the Sisters of St. Joseph, I might not be standing here.

Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test.

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.

It was not enough to come and listen to a great sermon or message every Sunday morning and be confined to those four walls and those four corners. You had to get out and do something.

Without our faith, we wouldn't have been able to succeed. On many occasions, before we'd go out on a sit-in, before we went on the freedom ride, before we marched from Selma to Montgomery, we would sing a song or say a prayer. Without our faith, without the spirit and spiritual bearings and underpinning, we would not have been so successful.

In 1965, the attempted march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7 was planned to dramatize to the state of Alabama and to the nation that people of color wanted to register to vote.