John Lewis was enrolled in a seminary in the Jim Crow city of Nashville when he embraced the belief that allowing himself to be beaten nearly to death in public would hasten the collapse of Southern apartheid.
In 1960, Lewis and his contemporaries carried that spirit into the sit-in campaign that forced Nashville to integrate its “white only” lunch counters. The following year, young protesters experienced homicidal levels of brutality when they boarded southbound Freedom Ride buses to challenge segregation in interstate transportation. When Lewis’s bus reached Montgomery, Ala., passengers were savaged by a white mob whose members carried every conceivable weapon — including bricks, chains, tire irons and baseball bats. Outside Anniston, Ala., Klansmen firebombed another bus and held its exit doors shut with the aim of burning the passengers alive.
The battering Lewis received four years later during the “Bloody Sunday” voting rights march in Selma, Ala., stands out for what happened next. Congress responded to the barbaric spectacle of state troopers bludgeoning demonstrators by finally outlawing the methods that the South had long used to prevent millions of Black people from registering to vote. Lewis was recovering from a fractured skull when Lyndon Johnson summoned him to Washington for the signing of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights movement’s holy grail. L.B.J. admonished Lewis to get the white South “by the balls” — by registering legions of Black people to vote — and to “squeeze, squeeze ’em till they hurt.”
Even as Lewis celebrated, he was under siege in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the potent civil rights organization whose chairmanship he held. His critics within the group complained that their chairman was too chummy with the white man in the White House and mocked him for rushing to have his suits cleaned whenever the president called. A SNCC faction led by the charismatic Black nationalist Stokely Carmichael had rejected the doctrines of interracial cooperation and Gandhian nonviolence to which Lewis had devoted himself. In the spring of 1966, the faction shoved Lewis aside and elected the fiery Carmichael to lead them.
As the historian David Greenberg writes in “John Lewis,” his panoramic and richly insightful biography, the former chairman “found himself, at age 26, with no job, unmarried and unsure what to do with his life. The movement to which he had devoted his adult life was veering away from the ideals that had animated it. To remain in the struggle, he would have to find another path.”
The haloed sainthood attributed to Lewis at his funeral four years ago was by no means evident the day SNCC showed him the door. Greenberg argues that his subject achieved the stature of legend only after his memoir “Walking With the Wind” was published to rapturous acclaim in 1998, when he was entering his second decade as the congressman from Georgia’s Fifth District, a position he would hold for the rest of his life.
Greenberg, who teaches history at Rutgers University, makes us privy to the alchemy that transformed a shy Alabama farm boy into a central voice of the movement that drove a dagger into the heart of Jim Crow. This biography sets a new standard by giving Lewis’s post-civil-rights story the depth of attention it deserves — and showing how our mild-mannered seminarian submerged his pacifist tendencies enough to succeed in the bare-knuckled world of electoral politics.
After parting with his beloved SNCC, Lewis tried working in New York but found the city “too big” and “too hopeless.” He returned to Atlanta, driven by nostalgia for a simpler Southern life and a vague longing to get elected to some office. He envied his SNCC friend, the Atlantan Julian Bond, who had been propelled into the Georgia Legislature by the Voting Rights Act.
Lewis regained his sea legs in Atlanta as the head of the nonprofit Voter Education Project. After Bond joined the organization’s board of directors, the two toured the South together, urging Black people to register. They became known to friends and family as “the Civil Rights Twins.”
Lewis’s contacts among Black Southern voters — and his status as a symbol of the voting rights struggle itself — made him a coveted ally for white Democrats with presidential aspirations (including, eventually, Jimmy Carter and the Clintons). He became even more of an asset in the 1970s, when he started returning to Selma to re-enact the “Bloody Sunday” march. These widely publicized visits elevated his personal profile and strengthened his hand as he pressed Congress to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act.
Lewis was well positioned to run when the Fifth Congressional District seat fell open in 1986, but Bond saw the seat as his by divine right. The contest turned into a clash of classes. Black elites lined up behind the tall, light-skinned and well-educated Bond, and urged the short, dark-skinned and poorly spoken Lewis to bow out. No doubt these slights reminded Lewis of the SNCC revolt 20 years earlier — but this time, he was having none of it. The more the lightly colored elites demeaned him, the harder he worked.
When the two faced off in debates, Lewis mercilessly attacked his old friend for refusing to submit to a drug test, playing on rumors of a cocaine addiction. Wounded, Bond asked if Lewis had cared for him during their Selma days — or had he harbored ill will even then? Lewis responded icily that the campaign was “not a referendum on friendship” but a referendum “on the future of our country.” By the end of the evening, the friendship between the Civil Rights Twins was dead and buried.
As Greenberg shows through numerous interviews, Lewis quickly learned to send home pork to his district while becoming one of the best-loved members of Congress. By the ’90s, he had also become something of a party apparatchik upon whom the Clintons and the Democratic establishment generally could depend. In the 2008 presidential primaries, however, devotion to Hillary Clinton, who was locked in a tight battle with Barack Obama, nearly cost him his sinecure.
Black voters who had remained with Clinton out of suspicion that Obama would fade shifted toward him when primary results proved his candidacy viable. After Obama took most of the South — including Lewis’s district — on Super Tuesday, pressure mounted on the hero of Selma to switch his allegiance. Younger Black voters in particular saw Lewis’s support for Clinton as a form of betrayal. When a young rival stepped forward to challenge the Lion of Selma for his seat, the recruit was widely assumed to represent the Obama team’s handiwork. For the first time, it looked as if Lewis might end his days as a former congressman. As the maelstrom broke around him, he complained to his staff that he was “worth more dead than alive.”
After a period of anguished indecision, Lewis pledged his support to the surging Obama, but never gained admission to the candidate’s inner circle. As “effusive as Obama was about Lewis in public,” Greenberg writes, those around the candidate resented the latecomer for signing on only when he had no other choice. These contretemps were of course set aside at the inauguration, where the saint of the voting rights movement was given a seat of honor. The ceremony over, Lewis gave the new president his program and asked him to sign it. When Lewis got it back, it read, “Because of you, John.”
The post How John Lewis Became a Moral Force in America appeared first on New York Times.
