Receiving award, Congressman John Lewis urges his listeners to act on injustice
Sharing words of love and justice, U.S. Rep. John Lewis had a message for a packed house at the Harvard Kennedy School on Tuesday: persevere. The 77-year-old Georgia congressman and Civil Rights icon was at the Institute of Politics to receive the 2017 Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award, presented by the Center for Public Leadership at the School. Following the presentation of the Maya Lin-designed award by David Gergen, professor of public service and co-director of the Center for Public Leadership, Lewis addressed the lessons of his own formidable past as well as the challenges ahead. In a conversation co-moderated by Nancy F. Koehn, James B. Robison chair of business administration at Harvard Business School, and ImeIme Umana, the first African-American woman editor of the Harvard Law Review and the Sheila C. Johnson fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, Lewis was asked what role young people in public life — such as the...