Yesterday, July 17, 2025, thousands of people gathered at more than 1,600 rallies across the U.S. to protest attacks on civil rights, voting access, and economic justice. The date marked the fifth anniversary of the death of Congressman John Lewis, and the protests honored his enduring call to make “good trouble, necessary trouble.”
From major cities to small towns and rural communities, participants held marches, teach-ins, food drives, and voter registration events. I attended the Good Trouble Rally in my hometown of Brookings, South Dakota.
Growing up outside a small town in the Great Plains, I rarely saw protests or rallies. For much of my life, activism felt like something that happened elsewhere, mainly in cities.
That’s why it was so moving yesterday to stand on the busiest street in town with a couple hundred neighbors, friends, and visitors from over two hours away. We held signs that read “Medicaid Saves Lives,” “Save Democracy,” and “Good Trouble.”
Over the last several decades, many in rural America have lost touch with our long and proud history of organizing and struggle. But that legacy runs deep.
Rural political movements have long shaped American democracy, rising in response to exploitation, neglect, and exclusion from power. One of the earliest was The Grange, founded in 1867 by farmers to challenge railroad monopolies and demand economic fairness. In the 1930s, milk strikes erupted across the Midwest and Northeast as dairy farmers dumped their milk to protest prices set below production costs.
During the 1960s and ’70s, the farmworker movement, led by César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, and others, organized Latino and Filipino laborers to demand fair pay and safe working conditions. Around the same time, the American Indian Movement (AIM) mobilized Native people in rural and reservation lands to fight centuries of injustice and assert Indigenous sovereignty.
Together, these movements show that rural America has always been a source of resistance and renewal. Civil rights leaders like John Lewis and Fannie Lou Hamer were well aware of this.
Lewis’s life and leadership were deeply rooted in the rural South. Born in 1940 in Pike County, Alabama, he grew up on a small farm without running water or electricity. His parents were sharecroppers—part of a generation of Black rural Americans who faced systemic economic oppression and land dispossession. As Dr. Ja’Lia Taylor documents in The Forgotten People, more than 90% of Black-owned farmland in the U.S. had been lost by 1997—an outcome of targeted violence, discriminatory policies, and economic exploitation.
But Lewis never left his roots behind. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he ensured that the organization prioritized grassroots organizing in rural, segregated communities, such as Lowndes County, Alabama, and the Mississippi Delta. He saw these rural citizens not as victims, but as the soul of the movement—people who were willing to risk everything to register to vote and demand their rights.
Later, as a member of Congress representing Atlanta, Lewis continued to fight for rural justice, advocating for better schools, healthcare, transportation, and protections for family farmers. He also worked tirelessly to defend the voting rights of rural Black Southerners, who continued to face suppression long after the Voting Rights Act was passed.
Today, many of the same challenges persist. Rural Black communities are still too often excluded from both racial equity and rural development efforts. That’s why Lewis’s legacy isn’t just something to commemorate—it’s a call to action. Legislation such as H.R. 8198, the Heirs Property Act, provides a model for rectifying historical injustices in land ownership and inheritance. But far more is needed—investments in broadband, education, healthcare, and local economies must follow.
When Lewis passed away on July 17, 2020, tributes poured in from across the globe. But in rural towns across the South, people rang church bells, held vigils, and remembered him not just as a national hero, but as one of their own.
In an essay published posthumously in The New York Times, Lewis left us with this charge:
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.
You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.
Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.
The Good Trouble Rallies yesterday were more than a tribute to Congressman John Lewis. They were a powerful reminder to those of us in Rural America that we are not alone in the fight for justice. For many in my hometown, whether they attended the rally or simply honked enthusiastically as they drove by on their way home from work, they were reminders that their neighbors feel the same way about the rollbacks we’re seeing in our communities on so many issues like civil rights, women’s rights, healthcare, and education.
The rallies demonstrate that there is strength and safety in numbers, and that those of us who see injustice in our communities are not isolated—we’re part of a growing movement with a long, rural tradition.
By honoring Lewis’s legacy, the rallies helped reignite the tradition of rural organizing grounded in solidarity and hope.
Progress may be slow. But after seeing hundreds of Good Trouble rallies across the country—including in places like Brookings, South Dakota—we can confidently say that in Rural America, the good trouble lives on.
