‘Our compassionate hero’Oklahomans pay tribute to late civil rights icon, Rep. John Lewis

Not long after arriving in Washington, D.C., as Oklahoma’s newest elected congressman, J.C. Watts decided to seize the opportunity. He invited Rep. John Lewis to lunch. “I wanted to pick his brain about the civil rights movement, its inner workings,” said Watts, who had begun to idolize the Georgia activist-turned-legislator and other giants of the movement as a child in Eufaula. “One of the questions I asked him was ‘John, how did you do it? How could you be nonviolent? They spit on you, you got kicked, beaten. You saw lynchings. Church bombings. How could you not strike back?’ “And this was his answer: ‘It would have hurt the movement.’” From that first meeting in 1995, the Republican...