I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.
John LewisOrnette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk
John LewisWe built a coalition of conscience, and that we can do it again, and we can go forward, and help redeem the soul of America.
John LewisMany of us in Nashville accepted nonviolence as a way of life, a way of living, not simply as a technique or a tactic.
John Lewis