John Lewis, who recently had a statue of himself unveiled in Decatur, in part because of his work and courage as one of the original Freedom Riders, is getting another honor this week: a MARTA bus.
On Thursday, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) will unveil a wrapped MARTA bus in honor of the late congressman and his wife, Lillian Miles Lewis.
The bus is the third in a series of wrapped buses celebrating Atlanta Civil Rights leaders. In January, a bus dedicated to Coretta and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. began service along the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard/ Auburn Avenue corridor. Juanita Abernathy, the wife of Ralph David Abernathy and a longtime member of the MARTA board, was honored in April with a bus.
“We want to recognize the profound contributions of Congressman Lewis, who championed public transit and MARTA, and fought for voters’ rights his entire life,” said MARTA General Manager and CEO Collie Greenwood. “MARTA history is Black history.”
Along with the bus unveiling, MARTA, along with the John and Lillian Miles Lewis Foundation, are also hosting a voter-registration drive.
Lewis, who died in 2020 after 33 years in Congress, was a staunch advocate of the Atlanta-based transportation center. In 2001, on MARTA’s 30th anniversary, Lewis called it a “shining example of what can be done.”
“We wouldn’t be the capital of the American South if we hadn’t had MARTA,” Lewis said.
Before entering politics, Lewis was a seminal American Civil Rights figure who rose out of the Nashville Student Movement to come of age as a Freedom Rider.
Beginning in 1961, Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality to test how federal interstate travel laws prohibiting segregation were being enforced in the Deep South.
“For four years I had traveled by bus from going from rural Alabama to Montgomery, Montgomery to Birmingham, Birmingham to Nashville and I saw the segregation, the racial discrimination,” Lewis said to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2011. “I saw those signs that said white waiting, colored waiting; white men, colored men … and I wanted to do something about it. And the Freedom Rides was my opportunity to do something about it.”
Lewis was on the first ride on May 4, 1961. The work was dangerous and bloody.
Buses were bombed and routinely attacked.
The first incident of serious trouble was in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where Lewis was badly beaten at the Greyhound bus terminal. He tried to enter a whites-only waiting room and two white men attacked him, injuring his face and kicking him in the ribs.
Later in Montgomery, Lewis and Jim Zwerg, a white college student, were savagely beaten.
“It was very violent,” Lewis would say later. “I thought I was going to die.”
“Congressman Lewis was inspired by the work of Rosa Parks and others to integrate transit systems across the country,” said Detria Everson, president and CEO of the John and Lillian Miles Lewis Foundation. “He would be proud to know that a MARTA bus with his pictures and quotes was serving constituents he represented in Congress.”
The unveiling will begin at 2 p.m. at the College Park MARTA Station.
At 3 p.m., election officials from Fulton and Clayton counties will be on-site to conduct a voter registration drive.
Later this year, buses are being planned to celebrate the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery and his wife, Evelyn Gibson Lowery, as well as Ambassador Andrew Young.
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