Segregation, King meeting set Lewis on quest for justice

Eighteen-year-old John Lewis stepped off a Greyhound bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1958 after receiving a round-trip ticket from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The teen had written King a letter because he was interested in trying to attend the all-white university in Troy just 10 miles (16 kilometers) from his family’s farm in Pike County. Lewis, who became a civil rights icon and a longtime Georgia congressman, died July 17 at the age of 80.