It would be almost another three years before John Lewis got his skull cracked protesting injustice. Three years before he and a throng of brave young people stood silently at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and were attacked by Alabama state troopers.

Beaten with clubs and trampled by horses simply because they wanted to walk. Because they wanted to walk 54 miles up Highway 80 to the state capitol in Montgomery to demand equal voting rights, to demand was rightfully theirs as Americans.

That was March 7, 1965.

Three years earlier, Lewis was a 22-year-old hero-in-training. He was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC, “snick” is what they were called) direct-action wing. Four of the members — Mary McCollum, James Peake, Joy Reagon and Lewis — answered a call from Cairo, Illinois, to join young African Americans trying to end segregation in the city nestled in the southern region of the state near the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Charles Koen grew up in Cairo and found the city’s racist practices “dehumanizing.” He was weary of not being able to swim in the public pool, weary of walking by the Mark Twain Restaurant yet not being able to enter, weary of being barred from the local bowling alley.

So, he recruited other local young people and formed the Cairo Nonviolent Freedom Committee. The group called SNCC.

On this day, June 26. 1962, the youngsters from SNCC joined Koen and the local committee, along with Rev. Blaine Ramsey, the fiery new pastor at Ward Chapel A.M.E. Church in Cairo, in leading a group of Black and white youth in passive, prayerful protests against racial segregation in the city.

They called it Operation Open City, and it included an 11-point plan to desegregate every corner of Cairo, including schools, housing, and employment. Their initial focus was public accommodations, and a few days before the bi-racial group staged a sit-in at the segregated pool.

One witness was Danny Lyon, a 20-year-old senior at the University of Chicago with an itch for photography — and history. Lyon hitchhiked to Cairo to shoot the protesters and arrived to see that he and the young activists were all but alone. “There was no press, no film cameras, no police, and no reporters,” he later said.

At the pool, the protesters stood and sang. At one juncture, they stopped to pray in the street.

As they did, a blue pickup drove straight at them.”

“A game of chicken ensued as the truck slowed and the demonstrators moved out of the way,” Lyons remembers, except for one defiant thirteen-year-old girl, who stood her ground until the truck knocked her down.”

Before the attack, Lyon took an iconic image of young Lewis kneeling in prayer alongside other protesters. The image is owned by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. You may see it here.

SNCC later utilized the photo on a poster with the words: “Come let us build a new world together.”

Lewis and Lyon developed a lifetime friendship.

The protests in Cairo continued for weeks. In August, the protesters descended on the Roller Bowl. “All hell broke loose,” recalled Hattie Kendrick. She said the students were “beaten like dogs. They were beaten over their heads with iron rods.” Several were hospitalized.

Like it would be later in Selma and Birmingham, the violent attacks on protesters — particularly young protesters — changed things in Cairo. Soon after the Roller Bowl attacks, Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, Jr. ordered the city to desegregate, to align with state law.

Of course, change in Cairo did not happen overnight. It was vigorously fought, so much that one may rightly say: Cairo never recovered from itself.

Today, one in five residents in this city lives in poverty.

If you didn’t know, now you know.

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.