David Greenberg writes:

Some children have an uncanny sense of their destiny. As a boy, John Lewis loved William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus.” His sister Ethel Mae Tyner once told an interviewer that she remembered her big brother reciting it around the house.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Could the boy reciting those lines have imagined that he would famously endure vicious beatings by white supremacists? That he would survive, and go on to serve more than three decades in Congress?

Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, was one of 10 children raised by sharecropper parents in Pike County, Ala. As I have learned while working on his biography, Lewis always loved to read — comic books, the Bible and, as a teenager, the Montgomery Advertiser. In its pages he absorbed the thrilling news in 1955 of the Montgomery bus boycott and its 26-year-old leader and apostle of nonviolence, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. [Continue reading…]