It's from Mississippi in 1961, one of the earliest of an eventual 40-plus arrests he would undergo in the cause of freedom. Facing the state penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi, and the many hells that portended for a black man in the Jim Crow South, Lewis looked into the camera ... and smiled.
He smirked, actually, as if feeling renewed, even cocky, in his determination to make America live up to its ideals. I asked him about that picture once. The word he used was "liberated." From his very first arrest, he said, "I felt free."
The struggle to make America act like America has never ended.