Carolina at the Greyhound Bus station. In 1961, i was at the freedom ride. We left washington ecma four, 1961, 13 of us. To test a division of the United StatesSupreme Court. Been in segregation on public transportation. My seatmate on the Greyhound Bus from washington d. C. , you must understand and 1961, black people in white people couldnt be seated together. Assist the charges against him. Well, for the two of us we arrived at a little Greyhound Bus station in south carolina. A group of white men met us in the doorway and started beating us and left us lobbying in a pool of blood and the officials came up and wanted to know whether we wanted to press charges. We said no we believe and of love and peace and nonviolence. I didnt know at that time may 9th, 1961 that this man was wilson, years later in february february 09 after president barack obama had been inaugurated he came to my office on capitol hill to seek out the peace grown. Mr. Lewis, will you forgive me . I want to apologize. Im sorry. They hugged me. I hugged them back and i saw him since then he recently passed. But it demonstrated the power of nonviolence, the power of love and the way of peace to be reconciled. Host did he come to your office out of the blue . Guest he had gone from different places to self carolina students that attended local college, Blank College students in 1960. Hed gone of around apologizing to them. A local press person made contact and they had been some of the freedom riders. So they still were working with them and discovered i was on the bus and i was one of the people there was beaten. Hes in washington and the congress. Host another significant date you write about february 27th, 1960 national your first of rest. I will never forget that day as long as i live. 20yearsold. We had been involved in the nonviolent workshops studying the way of Martin Luther king jr. We had social trauma believe could, over the plan and hundreds of students had been sitting in for the peaceful nonviolent action waiting to be served and someone would come up and spit on you were put a cigarette in your hair. They would pour hot water or coffee on you or beat you and we were sitting there in an orderly fashion not saying a word, looking straight ahead reading the book, working on the paper, and people start beating us and the local Police Officials came up and arrested all of us and not a Single Person would ben ee engaged in violence against us. That was my first arrest and that day when i was arrested i felt so free e and liberated iop felt like i crossed over. Er growing up in rura al alabama wn i asked my mother and father and grandparents and great grandparents about segregationdn and Racial Discrimination about the science signs, white men, colored men, white women, colored women, and i said, why. Thats the way it is. Dont get in the way. Dont get in trouble. But dr. King and rosa parks inspired me to get in trouble. So by sitting in, we were arrested, and we went to jail. 89 of us were arrested on that day. Host did you pay a fine . Were you in jail for a while . Guest we were in jail for a few hours. Matter of fact, the local School Officials came down and bailed us out. That was my first arrest. That was my introduction to southern jails. And i tell people i grew up sitting down on those lunch counter stools and going to jail in places like nashville and birmingham, jackson, mississippi, atlanta, georgia and a few other places across the south. Host john lewis, what was the ultimate result in nashville prior to the larger Civil Rights Movement . Guest the Nashville Community became probably one of the first major cities in the American South to segregate lunch counters and later desegregated all of its theaters. In nashville we took the, we started talking about the beloved community of making nashville an open city. Nashville was considered the essence of the south, and there was people in the white community, very progressive, liberals that really wanted to see nashville make the great transition to a peaceful and open city. Host howd you get to nashville . Guest i left rural alabama in september 1957, 17 years old, traveling by bus to study. I wanted to attend a school outside of troy, alabama, near where i grew up. I grew up 50 miles from montgomery, 10 miles from troy, and i applied to go to a School Called troy state college, now known as troy university. Submitted my application, my high school transcript. I never heard a word from the school. So i wrote a letter to dr. Martin luther king jr. He wrote me back and sent me a round trip Greyhound Bus ticket, invited me to come to montgomery and meet with him. But in the meantime, id been accepted to college in nashville. I went off to nashville, an uncle gave me a 100 bill, more money than id ever had, gave me a big foot locker. I put everything that i owned, my books, my clothing and went to nashville, and i literally grew up in nashville. It was there that i started studying the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence. Host who are shorty and sugarfoot . Guest shorty was a name that my mother and some my father called my mother sugar season foot. Host what did they do . Guest they worked on the farm. And i remember when i was 4, my father was a tenant farmer. But in 1944 he had saved 300, and he bought 110 acres of land. My family still owns that land today. And on this farm we raised a lot of cotton and corn, peanuts, hogs and cows and chickens. And i would be out there some days working in the field, and i would say to my mother, this is hard work, this is hard work. And she would say, boy, hard work never killed anybody. And i kept saying to myself, if i can just make it to the end of this row. And i complained, i said working in the field like this is just like gambling. You spend all this money on fertilizer and plants and seeds and sometimes you get too much rain, and you dont know whether youre going to make anything or not, and my mother would say thats all we can do, thats all we can do. But as a young child, when i was only about 7 and a half or 8 years old and later 9, 10, i would get up early in the morning and get my book bag and hide under the porch and wait for the school bus to come along to run to get on the bus to go to school. I didnt like working in the field. I didnt like being out there in the hot sun. Host would you get in trouble for that . Guest i did get in trouble, but they encouraged me to get an education. But at the same time, they needed me to work in the field. But it was i guess it was part of my first protest. On the farm it was my responsibility to care for the chickens, and i fell in love with raising chickens like no one else could raise chickens. Host you write about this in your most recent book, march book one, its a graphic novel. And in here you write about preaching to the chickens. Guest well, as a child, as a young child, i wanted to be a minister. I wanted to preach the gospel. So from time to time with the help of my brothers and sisters and cousins, we would gather all of our chickens together in the chicken yard, and my brothers and sisters and cousins were lined outside of the chicken yard, and i would start speaking, preaching. But the chickens along with my brothers and sisters and cousins would help make up the audience of the congregation. And i remember very well, i fell in love with raising those chickens. The chickens taught me patience, they taught me hard work, they taught me not to give up and not to give in. If you dont know anything about raising chickens on a pardon fau have to take the fresh eggs and mark them with a pencil, you place them under the setting hen, and you wait for three long weeks for the chicks to hatch. The reason you mark with a pencil before you place them under the setting hen were from time to time another hen would get on the same nest. There were be more eggs. And sometime i would take these Little Chicks and give them to another hen, either take the Little Chicks and put them in a box with a lamp and raise them on their own. I was never quite able to save 18. 98 to order the most inexpensive incubator for the Sears Roebuck store, this big catalog, some people called it an order book, other people called it the wish book i wish i had this, i wish i had that. So as a child, it was my duty, my responsibility to care for those chickens. And i tell children today some of those chickens would bow their heads, but im convinced that some of those chickens tended to listen to me much better than some of my colleagues listen to me today in the congress. They were more productive. Host what would happen when one of the chickens became sunday dinner . Guest oh, i would protest. [laughter] i didnt like the idea of my mother, father, some relative coming, getting one of the chickens were having for dinner. It was probably my first nonviolent protest. Host john lewis, why is your most recent book on your life in this form, in graphic novel form . Guest a staff person of mine back in, oh, 08 came to me and said, congressman, you should write, you should write a comic book. Well, the way it started he was going to the campaign was over, and he was going to go out to fandago to come comiccon. Ore staffers other staffers started laughing about it. And i said to the staff, you shouldnt make fun of him, you shouldnt laugh. There was another kind of book that came out in late 1957, early 1958, i believe, and it was called Martin Luther king jr. And the montgomery story published by an Organization Called the fellowship for reconciliation, a pacifist group. And i said that comic book, that little book sold for ten cents, but it influenced many of us in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement including the four students in greens burg, North Carolina. And many of us in nashville. And so this young man named andrew, my coauthor, came back to me and said, congressman, really you should write a comic book. And i finally said to him, yes, if you would do it with me. So the rest is history. And the book is doing very, very well. And this is just book one. We still have book two and book three. Book two will come out in the pall of 14. In the fall of a 14. Host john lewis in both walking with the wind and march book one, you write about june 1951 and a trip with uncle otis. Guest i could never forget that. I had never traveled out of alabama before i was 11 years old. And i remember so well my mother and her sister and aunt staying up late at night baking pies and cakes, frying chicken, wrapping the cellophane paper, putting food in shoe boxes for us to have something to eat as we traveled from rural alabama, through tennessee, through kentucky, through ohio on our way to buffalo. It was my first time out of south, and i remember 11 years old being in buffalo, new york. It was my first time seeing an elevator, my first time seeing an escalator. And it was so, so different. It had an impact on me. I saw black people and white people working together, living together. It was a different world. Host why did you make that trip . I went there to spend part of the summer with another brother, my mother, an aunt and some of my first cousins. Host another date in your history, september 2, 1986, democratic primary. Guest that was the election day in atlanta in the 5th Congressional District of georgia. That was the, that was the runoff. It was a very difficult race with a close and dear friend of mine by the name of julian bond who we had worked to together in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, we had been wonderful, wonderful friends. He had served in the statehouse, the state senate. He wanted to come to congress, and i wanted to come to congress. And it was a race that i never wanted to repeat one like that. Host you won . Guest i won. I prevailed. People, some people thought i didnt have a chance, that i didnt have a prayer. Julian was so well known not just in atlanta, but around the nation. I probably was better known outside of georgia in alabama, mississippi and other parts of the deep south. Well, especially nashville where i spent six years as a student. Host how did you get to atlanta . Guest i moved to atlanta during the early summer of 1963. I was 23 years old. I became the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee better known as sncc, one of the civil rights organizations. It was based in atlanta. I had just finished school at Fish University in nashville. I spent four years at American Baptist college, it was called the American BaptistTheological Seminary and later became American Baptist college, and i spent two years studying philosophy. So when i became the chair, i had to move to atlanta. I loved nashville. I fell in love with that city. It was the first city that i lived in. But i went to atlanta and spent a lot of time traveling all across the south going to arkansas, southwest georgia, to delta, mississippi, and to louisiana and North Carolina, south carolina. But atlanta presented me with an opportunity to be the place not just to be there, but to come to washington to meet with members of congress, to come and meet with president kennedy, with Martin Luther king jr. And others. A few weeks after id been elected chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, i was in washington in the white house with president kennedy, and i will never forget that first meeting with the president and then getting on a flight, flying from washington back to atlanta and preparing for the march on washington. That was 50 years ago. Host who are the big six . Guest the big six was the head of the major civil rights organization. You had a man by the name of a. Philip randolph. Mr. Randolph was considered the dean of black randolph who organized the brotherhood of dhaka car supporters rather than the man working on the railroad when you come to washington and work through the Union Station, there is the bus. He had been on his own posters and. You had Martin Luther king jr. Who was the president of the Conference Board in Atlanta Georgia and then there was wilkins the head of the naacp the National Association for the offense and of colored people and born in minnesota a wonderful man and then born in kentucky later became the head of the National Urban league. There was another man by the name of james former. Former had attended college in texas and he was part of the debating team. This little school, this team defeated harvard and a one. Later they did a study at Harvard University and became very involved with the naacp and later was one of the founders of the racial equality. It was the six of us in june of 63. You write in walking in the win by salles for the first time trip to new york city the of leading took place at the Roosevelt Hotel and provided my first look at the personality of roy wilkins. I cant say that i liked what i saw. He killed himself back when he met with the president but now among us he was asserting himself. We met in one of the Hotels Private dining rooms and from the moment that he entered the room, he came across to me as some sort of new yorker who thought he was smarter than the rest of the group. What was memorable but the meeting that day much more than the details of planning the upcoming march was watching the dynamics among the participants there was an exercise in power and positioning of political rivalry with chatting and waiting to take their seats around the large dining table, wilkins immediately shook his head and began looking for a room having people on the shoulder saying who would stay and who had to leave to read these was powerful people and he wasnt very polite about it. He was particularly nasty to Bayard Ruston but he was highly more cordial to the others. He didnt suggest that anyone leave the room. He demanded it. Congressman louis pugh you write it was amazing that he would do that and even more amazing was the fact that the others obeyed him. The guest most of the members of the big six had a representative assistance and he asked that each one would leave and only the principal only the head of the organization would remain and the bankrupt what happened. We stayed and there was a long drawnout discussions about who should head the march on washington, who should be the director and many of us felt that this man, this brilliant man, this organizer, that he should be the head and there was a discussion because the involvement and that the senator and people like Strom Thurmond and maybe eastland in the mississippi would use that against the march on washington. So, we had a caucus dr. King, james former and myself. We said we would select a Philip Randolph as the chair of the march of washington and let him select his deputy and that is what he did because we knew some people said it was so close that he would turn into him and that is exactly what he did. No one was going to question a Philip Randolph. Host good afternoon and welcome to book tv in debt for october 2013. This month we are talking with congressman john lewis a democrat of georgia and the author of autrey books walking with the wind a memoi