John Lewis has seen a lot in his 80 years, from a modest youth as the third of ten children in an Alabama sharecropping family, to a brutal and exhilarating early adulthood in the civil-rights movement, to his storied tenure in Congress, where he’s represented Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since 1987. But his later years have been marked by novelty, much of it lamentable: the election of Donald Trump, who he believes is the worst president for civil rights in his lifetime, and a more intimate struggle — his diagnosis in December with stage-four pancreatic cancer. Neither the ups nor the downs have much swayed his sense of optimism. Even this latest test — the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the protests, rioting, and often violent police crackdown that followed — has engendered in Lewis abundant cause for hope. On the eve of the July 3 release of Good Trouble, a documentary about his life and work, New York spoke to the congressman about why he’s staying the course — even when he fears waking up one day to find that our democracy has disappeared.
