Good Trouble is Right on Time

We are still in the Civil Rights movement because we, as Black Americans and women, are still in a Civil Rights struggle.  Representative John Lewis has been and still is on the front lines of that struggle.  In 1965, he fought for Black people to have the right to vote.  Needless to say, in 2013 the Voting Rights Act was challenged resulting in poll locations being moved with no notice and other ridiculous made up rules resulting in those very rights slowly eroding right along the very fabric of American democracy.

Tears rolled down my face and a lump in my throat, as I viewed footage of the police officers mowing down non-violent crowds of protestors and unleashing tear gas.   With the onslaught of black and brown bodies being snuffed out for not reason, one literally can’t tell the difference from the 60’s and today.

Directed by Dawn Porter with one of the producers being Erika Alexander (Living Single), Good Trouble is an exemplary depiction of what happens when one man makes a difference and what happens when you don’t acknowledge the past. For it is when we don’t acknowledge former injustices, that we are unable to move forward and continue democracy, freedom of speech and basic civil liberties.as members of the human race.

Having been arrested over 40 times, John Lewis is not one to be idle and silent on the sidelines.  Growing up in Troy, Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, Lewis fights with every fiber of his being to protect the rights of anyone being threatened with injustice or inequality taking on concussions to awake the consciousness against all enemies foreign and domestic.

However, It wasn’t all sunshine, rainbows and lollipops.  Especially, when he ran against his good friend Julian Bond for political office, putting an undue strain on the friendship that spanned decades. Not one piece of legislation he introduced was approved and even those that did get through have recently been challenged or attempted to be extrapolated from history by our current administration.  We’ve lost some major political heavyweights over the recent years, Ted Kennedy, Joseph Lowery, Rep. Elijah Cummings to name a few.  Those heavyweights coupled the recent emergence of protestors in the streets with a whole new set of demands along with a new set of political rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Lucy McBath, Veronica Escobar have proved that Lewis getting his skull fractured, being repeatedly jailed and fighting for the freedoms and rights of all Americans was worth it.

Good Trouble is a well documented film chronicling the life of a man who fought when his body was weak, his mind was tired and his spirit was weary.  But, his willpower never wavered for himself, Black people or the American people.  With the 2020 vote and the shenanigans surrounding it, the work of Representative John Lewis is now more important than ever.  Get into some Good Trouble and catch this documentary streaming right now.