It's Ted talks daily Amelie's Hugh today we have a moving and powerful special episode from the TED Legacy Project.

It features reflections from the late congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. He's in conversation with lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson. Lewis recounts growing up in rural Alabama, his years using nonviolent approaches in the struggle for civil rights and his thoughts on the unfinished work that's now left for the rest of us to take on.

John Lewis is such a towering figure, and this is a conversation you won't forget.

This is such a great honor for me to be in this room with you, to have this conversation, I can't tell you what it means to me to have this opportunity. You represent something so precious to so many of us. And I just wanted to start by thanking you for that, for your willingness to wrap your arms around people like me and to make me think that it's possible to do difficult things, important things. And I just want to start by asking you to talk a little bit about that experience of growing up in rural Alabama, in the black belt of America, and how that cultivated the spirit that shaped your life and your vision.

You used to have to pick cotton on your family's farm. Why are you so first as a young child, I would complain, why is my dad and my mother was a boy? So many things we can do. She's done with hard work. And what are we going to do? We have to make a living. But I was hoping. In almost prison for that day when people wouldn't have to work so hard in a hot sun. She was hoping also that things would be better, much better for us as a as a people and for my family.

My mother, she was always thinking ahead, did we get up early and go and pick as much time as we could? We would get more money because she knew the kind would be heavier, could do, would be on it. So when it was weighed, money will be increased. Your mother sounds really strategic.

My new mother, one day she came across a little newspaper in downtown short. This is something that a school in Nashville, Tennessee, interest the blank student could attend. She encouraged you to apply for that, even though that meant you'd be leaving the house, you'd be leaving the farm, you would not be contributing that that extra labor.

Well, I was prepared and willing to go to try to do what life would call doing better. Yeah, to get an education. But in the beginning, I wanted to attend Choice State. You wanted to to desegregate through a state, submit an application, my high school transcript and never heard a word from the school. So I wrote a letter to Dr. King. I didn't hear my mother, my father and my sisters and brothers and my teachers.

I told him I needed his and he wrote me back and sent me around Greyhound bus ticket and invited me to come to Montgomery to meet with him. And I can never, ever forget it. You knew about Dr. King even before the boycott. You had heard his sermon. The Apostle Paul preaches to American Christians. It's the speech he gives to all the people in Montgomery four days after Rosa Parks has been arrested. At the end of his speech, he says one day they're going to tell a story about a group of people in Montgomery, Alabama.

And then he says of black people who stood up for their rights and when they stood up for their rights, the whole world changed. And you had an immediate response to that call to action. The message really appealed to me. And it was sort of a social gospel message. Yeah, I wanted to do what I could to make things better. When you see something that is not right or fair or just, you have to say something. You have to do something just like a fire burning up in your bones and you cannot be silenced by my.

Mother was said to me, boy, don't get into trouble, don't get in trouble, you can get hurt, you can get killed. Dr. King and Rosa Parks eating Nixon and others that are read about it. And later, man inspired me to get in what I call the trouble necessary trouble. And I've been getting in trouble ever since. The sit ins, the Freedom Rides.

You went to Nashville and began the work of learning nonviolence. When did nonviolence become an essential part of your worldview and the theology and the activism that you wanted to create? Growing up, wanting wanted to be a minister, I felt that what Dr. King was saying in his speeches was in keeping. With the teachings of Jesus, so I readily accepted this idea of nonviolence, the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence, we were taught to respect the dignity in the words.

Of every human being and never give up on anyone to try to reach them with kindness or hope and faith and love. So you beat me. You may arrest me and throw me in jail, but I'm not going to engage in violence to respect you as a human being. And I'm wondering whether that is what gave you the courage. To endure some of that brutality, because a lot of people talk about nonviolence, they talk about the theology of law, but when you're on a bus in Anniston, Alabama, or in Montgomery, Alabama, as you've been surrounded by that mob and surrounded by that hate, surrounded by people who, you know, are prepared to do violent things, it's a different dynamic.

Know, accepted that Dr. King taught us to to love was in keeping with our Christian faith to love everybody in the hate. He was the hate is to have a burden to bear.

But it seems like you were strategic, too. You all thought a lot about when and where to go someplace. It wasn't just, oh, here's an opportunity here. Let's just do it. We just didn't jump up one day and decided that we would go to Selma. We check places out where there was a possibility of leadership or creating a viable organization where you had students, people prepared to get out of work and organize. And that's what we did.

We did everything that we could. To bring attention to a situation that was not good for people and if we could organize people, there were religious leaders, teachers and lawyers and others in these communities and neighborhoods where there were time to the training and and nonviolence. The philosophy as a we are living is a way of life that you become. For Pan, it it was a lot of rigorous training to to to be prepared to be in those very stressful situations and maintain that commitment to nonviolence.

And I don't think people appreciate how much work went into preparing people for that one.

It was something that we became committed to that had to go to role play social drama.

But telling that to a meeting someone. Knocking someone down, someone's blowing smoke in your face and calling your name and training people to be disciplined and not given up on the Freedom Rides and me in 1961, when I was 21 years old, leaving Washington, D.C. for the first time to go on a freedom ride. I thought we were going to die. As a matter of fact. I thought I saw death when I believe God Almighty can be here for a reason.

It's a powerful, powerful testament. I saw that picture of you and and your head is bloodied, this willingness to get back on a bus to do it again. And they interviewed you after some of that sit ins. And what was interesting to me about the way you talked about it is you were very clear. You said we're not just trying to do this for the black people in Nashville. We're trying to do this for everybody because they may not realize it yet, but what they're doing is wrong.

And I wouldn't be the Christian that I claim to be. I wouldn't be the good person I claim to be if I didn't try to help them get past this wrong thing they're doing. I think people want redemption. Our faith, tradition. We understand the power of redemption. We preach about it and we understand that there has to be confession. There has to be repentance. But collectively, as a society, we haven't really embraced that in this country.

We haven't really wanted to acknowledge the legacy of slavery in the history of lynching and segregation. People want to skip over the apology part. And you still see these Confederate flags and these symbols of resistance seems to be part of what is so urgent right now is that we get people to have the courage to say this was wrong and we have to reject that. But you have seen that redemption in ways that I think has been so extraordinary.

A few short years ago, one of the members of the Klan who beat me and beat my seatmate and a little Tom. Called Rock Hill, South Carolina. And that was lying in a pool of blood. Many years later, one member of the clan. And his son. Came to my office in Washington and you said, I've been a member of the Klan and one of the people that beat you and left you bloodied. I want to apologize.

His son started crying and then he started crying. He came up with his song to Hurt Me, and I saw this gentleman through other times, it's the power of the love of forgiveness to admit it and then change and move on. It does seem to me that if we can show people that on the other side of repentance, on the other side of confession, on the other side of acknowledgement, there's something beautiful like what you experienced with that Klan member, and maybe they'll find their courage to stand up and talk about the wrongfulness of these things.

And there have been curious how you would talk about what you learned from your time with Rosa Parks and Dr. King, what they taught you, what they left you with that has allowed you to do the work you've done something about. These individuals touched me. They reached me. If it hadn't been for E.D. Nixon or Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ruth Abernathy. And so many others, I don't know what would have happened to me.

I could have been lost. The Martin Luther King Junior to.

A round trip Greyhound bus ticket and invited me to come to Montgomery to meet with them, my First Baptist church is impossible, impossible for them, for the boy to dream that one day he will meet Martin Luther King Jr.. I remember so well when he said, well, you the boy from Troy, are you John Lewis?

And I said, Dr. King, I'm John Robert Lewis, and you call me more from Scheu High is the boy from Schreuder and sometimes he to say things like, John, do you still preach in those years that became when I'm taking a shower so no one can hear me.

And he would laugh, I think, when he when he was assassinated.

When he died. Something that and all of us. If he had little you know, there was a young man, yeah, yeah, um. Maybe our country would be much better in the world, community will be better. We were talking earlier about those critical moments, 1964, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act in 1965. And it seems like our focus was on ending the violations of rights and less on remedying this long history of violations and what it would take to repair all the damage that has been done.

And today, I'm thinking, you know, in addition to no longer denying people the right to vote, maybe these states. Should have done something operational, should have done something remedial, they should have said, you know what, we're going to let black people we're going to automatically register every black person to vote. The vote is the most powerful non-violent instrument or two that we have in a democratic society. We must make it easy and simple for people to use it.

The people who gave, the very last people who took the beatings and suffer. Yeah, said we have a right to know what is in the food we eat is what is in the water to drink or to Avebury. You were the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963 and you were very eloquent and you were very compelling. I had worked on the speech with some of the staffers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but I was determined.

To inspire young people, another generation. And when I looked out, so let's see a few minutes, I said to myself, this is it, I must go for an Italian who came together. And we work, all of us, very hard on getting the lowest crowd on the mall that day. But it went so well into the president, President Kennedy. Invited us down to the White House to watch us or any student at the Oval Office greeting us and beaming like a proud father.

And he kept saying to each one of us, you did a good job. You did a good job, and pointed out to Dr. King, you said you did a good job and you had a dream. That was my last time seeing President Kennedy. Well, I'm not here. Yeah, there was something about the man. Yeah. That was so inspiring.

Yeah. You talked about how he and Robert Kennedy were an influence to get into politics. I know you first ran in the 70s and then you ran again in the 80s. I'm curious what motivated you to make that shift? I saw in politics that you could be a force for good.

So I was motivated to to run for office and people started encouraging me, you should run for something and I made a decision. I don't think I changed that much. You know, I think I'm the same same person myself. But I want to say was what to do, what I want to do. I think you have to be a force for good. Yeah. To inspire people. To encourage people. I was so moved when you organized the protests around gun violence.

And I'm wondering how you think we should be teaching people what it means to be hopeful. How do you think about communicating that to to both your colleagues in the Congress and in another generation of leaders who may get down? We get knocked down, but you get up and you keep moving. You keep personal. That was part of the civil rights movement. A new day, a better day. We're going to come. But we had to help that.

They come, we can be quiet, can be silent, and we have to be engaged in Ukraine. We I don't know why you think there are strategies that we've abandoned that we need to pick back up to confront the issues that we're looking at today.

I think there's so many tactics and techniques that we sort of abandoned that we need to go back. And pick up these techniques and tactics and use them. We need to teach people, especially our young people, know we taught grade school students and high school students and college students to learn to embrace the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence, how to engage in nonviolent direct action. We need it now more than ever before, I think you brought into our political culture this spirit of activism, the spirit of of of strategic protest, a willingness to even occasionally be disruptive.

You haven't attended all of the inaugurations of presidents when you felt like there were issues around the legitimacy of those elections. And I see a new generation of politicians that seem to embrace some aspects of that. And I'm wondering whether you think that the kind of modeling you've done is going to be part of your legacy that's important to you as a politician.

I was so impressed. This new breed of young men and young women that are coming into elective position, it's not just at the national level, but also at the local level. I think we know more than ever before we need men and women of conscience, judges, especially on the federal level, but also at the state and local level to say we got to look at the men, we've got to make up. Yeah, people don't have a hundred years to make up.

Yeah. We need to do it and do it now.

You've become somebody who's had such an impact on the world. When people talk about you 50 years from now, a hundred years from now, what you want them to say, how you want to be thought of, how you want to be talked about? My hope. I don't think I would have much to say about it. But if we do try to create a better society, a better world, helping to liberate and free people, having to save people and move people to a different and better sense of humanity, I have met people who worked with you.

There's so many that whose names have never really been known. But I encounter them every now and then because I get to live in Alabama and I talk about a man I met who was in a church. I was giving a talk and he was in the back, is in a wheelchair. And he was staring at me the whole time I was giving this talk. And he had this stern, almost angry look on his face. And when I finished, my top people came up.

They were very nice and appropriate. But that older man, older black man in a wheelchair just kept staring. And then they finally wheeled himself to the front. And when he came up to me, he said, Do you know what you were doing? And I just stood there. And then he asked me and he said, Do you know what you're doing? And I mumbled something. I don't remember what I said. And then he asked me one last time.

He said, Do you know what you are doing? This man will tell you what you're doing. He said, you're beating the drum for justice. You keep beating the drum for justice. And I was so moved, I was also relieved. I just didn't know what was about to happen. But then he said, come here, come here, come here. And he pulled me by my jacket and he pulled me down closer and he turned his head and he said, You see this scar I have right here behind my right arm?

He's got that scarring. Greene County, Alabama, in nineteen sixty three, working with C.T. Vivian. Then he turned his head. He said, you see this cut down here? I got that in Philadelphia, Mississippi, trying to register people to vote. And then he said, you see this bruise? That's my dark spot. I got that in Birmingham, Alabama. Nineteen sixty five doing the Children's Crusade. And then he said, people look at me, they think I'm some old man covered with cuts and bruises and scars, but I'm going to tell you something, that these are not my cuts.

These are not my bruises. These are not my scars. You said these are my Medals of Honor. And I am sitting here sitting next to you, and I still see the scars. And I know that there are the bruises and I know that there are the cuts. And yet you are still talking about love and redemption and justice and inspiring people like me. And I just want you to know, I don't think there's an American living that is more honored, more representative of the great values of this nation, of the hope of this nation than you.

And I just I just cannot tell you how thrilled and privileged I am to have this opportunity and to have this opportunity to share. And I want you to know I am going to keep fighting. A lot of us going keep fighting. And you have caused us to believe that we cannot rest until justice comes. And I want to thank you for that, which you will. Absolutely, my friend. Absolutely. Bless you. OK, thank you, brother.

Thank you. Thank you. PR ex.