U.S. Rep. John Lewis
With the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer approaching, U.S. Rep. John Lewis is leading members of Congress on a three-day civil rights pilgrimage through Mississippi and Alabama.
They’re coming together, “not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans, men and women who believe somehow and some way that we can find a way to create the American Community,” the Democrat from Georgia said.
This was once the Bryant Grocery Store, where Emmett Till reportedly bought candy and wolf-whistled at a white woman in 1955. The store is long since closed and is falling down.
Others making the trip facilitated by the Faith & Politics Institue include U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, South African Ambassador Ibrahim Rasool, and civil rights veterans, including Leslie B. McLemore and Hollis Watkins.
Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey is expected to join the trip and so are former Gov. William Winter and former U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering.
The cousin of Emmett Till, Wheeler Parker, is also expected on the trip, which will stop at the store in Money, Miss., where Till reportedly wolf-whistled at a white woman — only to be killed days later by her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam.
Alabama troopers beat John Lewis and other protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.
The trip will also visit the Medgar Evers Home Museum and stop at Tougaloo College on 11 a.m. Saturday to hear from veterans of Freedom Summer in Mississippi.
The trip will end Sunday with a reenactment of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where Lewis and others were brutally beaten. The march from Selma to Montgomery drew national attention and helped inspire the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
