When John Lewis was a child he preached to his chickens. He performed chicken baptisms, weddings and funerals. “They were in the truest sense his flock,” historian David Halberstam wrote of Mr. Lewis in his 1999 book “The Children.”

The injustices of the world led Mr. Lewis away from the Alabama cotton farm where he was born and those chickens. “I heard the whispers of the spirit calling me to wrestle with the soul of a nation,” he wrote in his 2012 “Across That Bridge.”

Wrestle he did. Mr. Lewis co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helped organize lunch counter sit-ins and many other actions in the early 1960s. Despite constantly being denied service, Mr. Lewis wrote of having “to keep loving the people who denied me.”

He did keep loving, though people did much worse than deny counter service. “As we participated in protest after protest, sit-in after sit-in, where crowds of uncontrollable angry people swarmed around us yelling and jeering, where we were beaten with billy clubs, lead pipes, tramped by horses, and attacked by dogs, our faith was not dampened.”

Such was Mr. Lewis’ abiding commitment to a nonviolent way of life that his faith “actually grew in power and strength” when he was injured and abused.

Such was John Lewis’ courage, both physical and moral.

An original Freedom Rider, Mr. Lewis rode buses through the American South testing the Supreme Court decision that outlawed segregation in interstate transit. These gallant men and women rode so that justice and freedom might come to the Deep South. They continued because, otherwise, violence would overcome nonviolence.

In 2009, Mr. Lewis met with one of the men, Elwin Wilson, who assaulted him at a South Carolina bus station in 1961. Mr. Wilson traveled to Washington to meet Mr. Lewis and to ask his forgiveness. “He started crying, his son started crying, and I started crying,” Mr. Lewis said. Forgiveness came.

Serving Georgia’s 5th Congressional District for more than three decades, Mr. Lewis became known to colleagues as the “Conscience of the House,” the kind of honorific that is rarely sincere, but was in his case.

Courage is rare enough. Physical and moral courage in combination is extraordinarily rare.

Rarer still is practical action.

John Lewis said: “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to do something.”

Words, postures, opinions are not enough. You have to act. You have to do.

If the activists of today have replaced the chickens of his first flock, they should listen to the sermon. The sermon, ultimately, is the life, for he lived his values. The values were love, courage and action.

The struggle was for justice. John Lewis died last week at 80 — his struggle done and won.

First Published: July 21, 2020, 8:47 a.m.