As dusk settled over one of this city’s busiest intersections on Friday evening, residents gathered with candles and handmade signs to honor the late Congressman John Lewis and to protest what organizers described as a mounting rollback of voting and civil rights.

The candlelight vigil, organized by the grassroots group Indivisible CA-45, was one of hundreds of local actions held across the country as part of “Good Trouble Lives On,” a national weekend of action running July 17 through 19. The date marks the anniversary of the death of Lewis, the civil rights icon and Georgia congressman who died on July 17, 2020, and who spent his life urging Americans to get into what he called “good trouble, necessary trouble.“

The Brea event was framed around a sense of urgency that organizers say has only sharpened since a similar vigil in 2025. In its call to action, Indivisible CA-45 pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s April 29, 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais— a 6-3 ruling that sharply weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that Lewis helped bring into being through his activism in Selma and beyond. The group cast the vigil as a direct response, writing that the movement “must rise up and shout out in protest” in the wake of the decision.

That ruling has become a rallying point for the broader “Good Trouble Lives On” campaign, whose organizers say the country is “facing the most brazen rollback of civil rights in generations.” The national effort invokes the spirit of Selma, Montgomery, and the 1963 March on Washington, tying the historic civil rights struggle to present-day fights over voting access, redistricting, immigration enforcement, and the right to protest.

Indivisible CA-45 has become a fixture at the corner of Imperial Highway and State College Boulevard in Brea, where members have rallied every Monday for more than a year at what they call the busiest intersection in the city. The group returned to that tradition of high-visibility, peaceful demonstration for the John Lewis vigil, echoing the candlelight gathering it held on the same anniversary in 2025.

True to the format the organizers had planned, the evening centered on candlelight and music — a quieter, more reflective counterpart to the daytime marches and rallies held elsewhere over the weekend. Participants were asked to bring signs and to keep the event peaceful, in keeping with a core principle of the national campaign: a commitment to nonviolent action and de-escalation, mirroring the discipline Lewis himself modeled throughout his career.

The “Good Trouble Lives On” organizers emphasize that their events are non-partisan, asking participants not to advocate for or against any candidate or ballot measure, and to leave weapons — even legally permitted ones — at home.

The Brea vigil was one thread in a national tapestry. Across California and the country, communities marked the weekend with rallies, marches, teach-ins, voter-registration drives, and vigils under the shared banner of honoring Lewis and defending civil rights. The 2025 iteration of “Good Trouble Lives On” drew an estimated 200,000 participants across roughly 1,600 locations nationwide; the 2026 weekend of action expanded the format into three days built around the themes of “Teach, Reach, and Preach.“

For the Orange County residents who gathered in Brea, the message was local and personal but rooted in a national inheritance. As Lewis often reminded the country, the vote is “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society” — and, on the sixth anniversary of his death, his admonition to make good trouble echoed once more at a Southern California crossroads.