Perhaps you’ve seen the words "Good Good Trouble”—on bumper stickers, shirts, or in other print. Those words are part of statesman and civil rights activist John Lewis’ legacy and life of service. As a young man, he participated in the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, going on to serve Georgia in the US House of Representatives until his death in 2020.
In 2012, John Lewis spoke at Moravian College (now University), telling young people and community members to: "Be courageous. Get in the way."
Words this writer drove out to Pennsylvania to hear.
Like Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Christian Theological Seminary, Leymah Gbowee at Wabash, and Malala Yousafzai at DePauw, Lewis at Moravian carried a sense of joy rooted in the certainty of his purpose. Though all four speakers this writer has been privileged to hear were joyful, if tempered by their experiences of physical risk and political struggle, Lewis was less outwardly exuberant. He didn’t laugh with the buoyant freedom of Tutu or Gbowee, but he still carried a lightness that seemed to come from having already paid the price for his convictions and finding, somehow, that it was worth it.
In the Q&A, students asked about the beatings he endured on the Freedom Rides, about being nearly killed on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, about how he went from training as a preacher to teaching in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and then to serving as a Member of Congress. Recognizing that there was still too much violence, too much hunger and poverty, he called students to have courage in their own moment in history: “Get in the way. In a good way.”
That phrase—“in a good way”—is where his idea of “good trouble” lives. It’s not the hot take or the clapback. It goes beyond the occasional demonstrations and protests into sustained, focused work that brings about change.
Lewis’s “good trouble” asks us to see the systems that keep people “left out and left behind” and then get in the way. Here in Crawfordsville, that’s helping someone just released from detention get back to their family and providing menstrual products to women who can’t add them to their limited SNAP balance. It’s mutual aid: alleviating someone’s financial gap, helping in the moment or filling a little free pantry. It’s volunteering with FISH, the Tri Kappa lunch program, or at the Free Clinic. It’s ensuring families aren’t divided. It’s helping people get to the polls to vote.
John Lewis grew up in the Jim Crow South, the son of sharecroppers in rural Alabama, and learned early what it meant to be systematically excluded from full citizenship. As a young man, he committed himself to nonviolent resistance, joining the Civil Rights movement and participating in sit‑ins, Freedom Rides, and marches that challenged segregation at lunch counters, bus terminals, and ballot boxes. He became a key leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, later, a central figure in the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery. On Bloody Sunday, he was brutally beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, his skull fractured as he and others tried to cross in a peaceful demand for voting rights.
Lewis did not stop with protest. He carried the struggle into electoral politics, serving for decades as a congressman from Atlanta, Georgia, and championing civil rights, voting access, and economic justice from within the institutions he had once picketed. The throughline in his life—whether in the streets or on the House floor—was a belief that ordinary people, acting together, could transform unjust systems without surrendering to despair or hatred. He often spoke of building the “Beloved Community,” a society in which racism, poverty, and violence were not inevitable features but problems to be solved through persistence, courage, and, yes, trouble of the right kind. By the time he became a widely admired elder statesman, “good trouble” had become both his mantra and his invitation to younger generations.
That invitation is precisely why the U.S. League of Women Voters’ “Good Trouble Lives On: John Lewis Day of Action” matters. When the League encourages a nationwide weekend of action devoted to civic participation and strengthening democracy, it is not simply organizing another campaign activity; it is echoing Lewis’s conviction that the vote is, in his words elsewhere, “the most powerful nonviolent tool” we have in a democratic society. The focus on voter registration translates his call to “get in the way” into concrete, local practices: helping new voters navigate the process, building relationships with communities that have historically been marginalized, and ensuring that people have both access to the ballot and a sense of belonging in public life.
In a political culture saturated with symbolic gestures, the League’s emphasis on practical outreach is itself a form of good trouble. Registering voters, staffing tables at community events, partnering with neighborhood organizations—these are not glamorous acts. They rarely trend on social media or make the evening news. Yet they quietly interfere with the patterns of disengagement and disenfranchisement that Lewis spent his life resisting. When a volunteer helps someone complete a registration form, explains the importance of local elections, or demystifies the process for a first‑time voter, they are “getting in the way” of apathy and exclusion, in the best possible sense.
For those of us who sat in rooms where Lewis once spoke, these days of action offer a chance to honor his legacy in a manner consistent with his life. Memory alone will not protect voting rights. The League of Women Voters is reminding us that the real tribute is to do work that is proportionate, even in a small way, to the risks he and others took: to stand where our presence disrupts injustice, to invest our time and skill in widening participation, and to insist that democracy is a practice, not a slogan. If we heed that call—if we sign up for a voter registration drive, train as poll workers, or help neighbors make a plan to vote—we carry forward the lightness I saw in Lewis in 2012: the joy of knowing we have, at least for a moment, chosen to get in the way, in a good way, on purpose.
The League of Women Voters is joining the Good Trouble Lives On: John Lewis Day of Action weekend, taking place July 17–19. State and local Leagues are especially encouraged to lean in on Saturday, July 18 — the “Reach” day of action — by organizing or participating in voter registration efforts in partnership with your communities. This is a powerful opportunity to register new voters, build local relationships, and carry forward John Lewis’s call to make “good trouble.” If you’re interested in participating, you can sign up and find more information: https://www.mobilize.us/john-lewis-actions/c/host-an-event/event/create/?utm_source=TheLeagueofWomenVoters.