Rep. John Lewis fights racial injustice, crowd-surfs, on Colbert's Late Show

(Image credit: Late Show)

last updated 1 September 2016

Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis talked about breaking the rules and fighting the good fight on Wednesday's Late Show. He also crowd-surfed, thanks to Christian Slater. Stephen Colbert asked Lewis about the sit-in he helped lead in Congress to force a vote on gun control laws, and Lewis said, "Sometimes you have to find a way to get in the way, get [in] trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble." He explained that he learned the value of breaking bad rules from Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1950s, when he was still a teenager.

Lewis has written about the march from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama, in a graphic novel, March, and he told Colbert that he was inspired to tell the story in drawings by a comic book from the 1950s, Martin Luther King: The Montgomery Story, which Colbert's team procured a copy of. "That little book became like a road map, it became the way in and the way out," Lewis said. "And it's our hope that March, these books, will become a road map for another generation."

When asked, he said that 49ers quarterback Colin Kapernick had every right to protest by sitting down during the national anthem, and should be supported. "I truly believe when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to do something," Lewis said. Watch below to see the addendum to March drawn up by Colbert's staff, and of course, watch the 76-year-old civil rights hero get carried away in the arms of Colbert's audience. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.