The Voice That Heals

The blood ran down his face in crimson rivers. John Lewis lay on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, his skull fractured, his body broken. The young man from Troy, Alabama. The young man who had already spent years preaching nonviolence and love in the face of hatred. He had been silenced. Or so it seemed.

But Lewis had learned long before that bridge about the power of a voice that refuses to wound back. Even as a seminary student organizing sit-ins, he studied Gandhi's teachings. He practiced Martin Luther King's philosophy of responding to hatred with love. When white supremacists spat on him, beat him, dragged him from buses, his voice never turned to venom.