John Lewis left us with one last lesson.

The late civil rights icon and Democratic congressman from Georgia taught so many during his 80 years here on earth.

By his activism, he instructed by example on the importance of courage and conscience. Through his writing, he versed us on the significance of history and memory. With his service, he educated us on the sacred value of duty.

All his lessons were variations on a theme.

John Lewis was a teacher who believed the learning that mattered most involved moral edification. He knew we had learned the right lesson — the good lesson — when we realized we need to treat each other better.

With kindness.

With respect.

With fairness.

With justice.

The man’s will was extraordinary. One of 10 children born to Alabama sharecropper parents, he battled a stutter when he was young. He conquered it by preaching, hour after hour after hour, to the chickens he tended.

That remarkable discipline and drive stood him in good stead for the challenges ahead.

Because the civil rights movement has become a defining moment in American history, it is easy to lose sight of some of the basic human features of those, such as Lewis, who led it. One of those features is their youth.

They were little more than children when they launched the campaign that changed a nation. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 when the Montgomery bus boycott began — and not yet 40 when an assassin’s bullet cut him down in Memphis just a little more than a dozen years later.

Lewis was even younger. He was just past 20 when he joined the Freedom Riders, only 23 when he spoke in front of Abraham Lincoln’s stone visage at the March on Washington and a seasoned-beyond-his-years 25 when he traveled to Selma and a date with destiny.

For most young men, the early 20s are a time of impetuosity, of acting first and thinking later, of weighing consequences only in retrospect.

Not in Lewis’s case.

The self-control he summoned to combat his stutter by delivering sermons to poultry he devoted to the service of a cause.

The cause of humanity.

Because the cause demanded it, he allowed himself to be assaulted. To be arrested — more than 40 times. To be beaten almost to the point of death.

Again and again, he mastered the young man’s — even humanity’s — natural inclination to meet violent aggression by either fighting or fleeing and instead stood still.

His goal was to force unjust institutions to bear the full cost of their acts of injustice. If that meant going to jail over and over, so be it. If that meant having his skull broken like an eggshell and fearing that his life had ended at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, again, so be it.

The man had steel for a spine.

But he also had a profound faith. He believed in the power of martyrdom, in the way that ordinary people — say, an Alabama sharecropper’s son who struggled with a stutter — could redeem not just themselves but others by enduring undeserved suffering while confronting entrenched injustice.

Lewis saw sacrifice as a privilege, each opportunity to serve a chance to put his faith to work.

That he died at this moment in our history teaches us, yet again, that what is right rarely comes easily. This man suffered horrific beatings and time behind bars to advance the cause of justice.

But he breathed his last when many of our fellow citizens say wearing masks to preserve lives during a time of pandemic is just too great a burden for them to bear.

That tells how much work we still must do.

That’s OK.

John Lewis has shown us what we can be.

What we must be.

His long-dead colleague Dr. King famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

John Lewis helped make that arc bend.

As legacies go, that’s not a bad one.

May he rest in peace.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com. Send comments to [email protected].