John Lewis, Son of Alabama, Makes His Last Journey Home

TROY, Ala. — In the coming days, John Lewis will be brought to the halls of power. He will lie in state in the Capitol in Washington, as well as in the statehouses in Alabama and Georgia. He will be mourned by lawmakers and governors and the many other influential figures he came to know during more than 30 years in Congress.

But before all that, he came home.

“You know now when I look at all the accolades, the pictures I see all the time, I think about where he came from,” Ethel Mae Tyner, Mr. Lewis’s sister, said of her brother, the Georgia congressman and civil rights leader, during a memorial service on Saturday in Troy, Ala., the small town where he grew up on a farm raising cotton.

His brothers and sisters shared their pride in seeing how Mr. Lewis, who died on July 17 at the age of 80, ascended and in the work he did along the way. But while the world knew John Lewis the activist and congressman, his family sought to memorialize the brother they called Robert, his middle name, used only by those closest to him.

Robert, they said, was the boy who wanted to be a pastor and preached to the chickens on the farm. Robert was one who was afraid of thunder and lightning, dashing inside whenever storm clouds would fill the sky. They saw Robert grow into the man who, as Mr. Lewis always put it, looked to stir “good trouble.”