The first time John Lewis traveled to Mississippi in 1961, he was arrested and jailed with other Freedom Riders, black and white, who challenged segregation in a bus station.
Lewis remembers going into a restroom labeled for white men only. A Jackson police officer told him and other young people in the group to leave. They refused.
“The next words he said: ‘You’re under arrest.’ And that was my introduction to the state of Mississippi and the city of Jackson,” Lewis told The Associated Press on Thursday in a phone interview from Atlanta.
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