John Lewis: Civil Rights Legend

Author's Note: This post was originally published in May, 2017.

In late March, civil rights icon Representative John Lewis (D-Georgia) spoke before the House during the initial debate on the GOP's health care bill. He said, "This is the heart and soul of the matter. We cannot abandon our principles, Mr. Speaker. We cannot forget our values. We have fought too hard and too long to back down now."

A few months earlier, the current president, in a tweet, called Lewis "all talk, talk, talk no action or results."

Rather than take time to discredit that statement, I refer you to David Remnick's piece in The New Yorker.

One positive result of that infamous tweet was that a lot of people, including me, were curious to delve a little deeper into Lewis' history.

John Lewis grew up the son of a sharecropper in Troy, Alabama. He became sensitive to the reality of racial inequality while attending grade school. He noticed that white schools seemed to be newer, with more resources being given to them. Black students, on the other hand, were left with the hand-me-downs. Of course, growing up in the South in the early 40's, he experienced the "COLORED" and "WHITES ONLY" entrance signs guarding many public places. And some places, like the local library, he couldn't enter at all. His life and the life of most blacks living in the South was anything but "separate but equal."

So, by the time Lewis was attending American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, he was primed to take action when faced with the ever-present reality of inequality that surrounded him and his fellow African-Americans.

In his book, Walking With the Wind, Lewis describes how he joined efforts to desegregate downtown Nashville, beginning with non-violent sit-ins at lunch counters. He eventually became a leader in the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

The logistics involved behind those early lunch counter sit-ins would become one of the templates used throughout the South to move towards civil rights.

For years Lewis was at the forefront of other efforts, like the voting rights drive in Mississippi. He was one of the original 13 "freedom riders," putting his life on the line, with others, to help ensure that black Americans had the right to vote. Previous to these efforts, Jim Crow - illegal means used to threaten and dissuade blacks from registering to vote - was the law of the South.

John Lewis, standing third to left of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lewis walked along with Martin Luther King, Jr. as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on "Bloody Sunday" (March 7, 1965).

(You can see Lewis standing in the front row of the picture on the right, in a white coat). It was Lewis who actually had much more to do with the logistics behind the March than King. And it was Lewis who had his head cracked open by an Alabama state trooper's nightstick.

Despite profuse bleeding, he refused to go to the hospital, instead escaping back to Selma to speak at Brown Chapel to encourage other marchers not to give up hope. A few weeks later there was another, successful, march across the bridge to Montgomery.

In August of the same year, the first Voting Rights Act was passed. It was passed to enforce the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution. It read, in part, "no voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of their race or color."

By the time that the Voting Rights Act was passed, John Lewis had more than established himself as a leader in the civil rights movement. Both in the South and nationwide. Two years earlier, he spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, sharing the podium with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lewis' original speech was considered to be too strong by many of the other leaders of the March. In his book, Lewis recalls editing his speech, in an effort to keep the unity of the movement that was gaining momentum.

After that speech, Lewis went back to Mississippi to continue with voter registration and desegregation activities. He eventually left the SNCC in 1966, but continued efforts to enfranchise minorities. In 1986 Lewis was elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia, where he remains one of the most respected members of that chamber.

It was from that moral authority that Lewis helped lead a sit-in of 40 Democratic representatives on June 22, 2016 in response to the mass killings in Orlando earlier that month. Lewis sent out a tweet, "We have turned deaf ears to the blood of the innocent and the concern of our nation. We will use nonviolence to fight gun violence and inaction."

In summing up his life, Lewis said, "When I was growing up my mother and father and family members said `Don't get in trouble. Don't get in the way.' I got in trouble. I got in the way. It was necessary."