On NPR's Morning Edition this morning, a StoryCorps segment with Alabama native Rep. John Lewis, told the story of his first meeting with Martin Luther King.
He was 15 when Rosa Parks was arrested. Two years later, he wrote to Rev. King.
"Not only did King write back to Lewis, he also included in the letter a round-trip bus ticket to Montgomery and an invitation to meet him, which Lewis eventually did — in March 1958.
At 18, Lewis traveled 50 miles from Troy to Montgomery by Greyhound. Fred Gray, the lawyer to King and Rosa Parks, picked him up from the bus station and drove him to the city's First Baptist Church — a historic site tied to the civil rights movement — where he met King in the pastor's office.
"I was so scared. I didn't know what to say or what to do," Lewis recalled. "And Dr. King said, 'Are you the boy from Troy?'
"And I said, 'Dr. King, I am John Robert Lewis.' I gave my whole name. But he still called me the 'boy from Troy,' " he said." (From the StoryCorps interview with Lewis)
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