Representative John Lewis of Georgia, an icon of the American Civil Rights movement, received a fitting send-off this week despite the political and economic upheaval in the United States. During a weeklong celebration of his decades of public service, his body was moved from Alabama, to Selma – where it was carried, movingly, over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to commemorate his astonishing heroism there in March 1965 – then taken to the US Capitol Rotunda to lie in state. Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama spoke at his funeral and longstanding friends and colleagues remembered him with appreciable warmth, admiration, and gratitude.
Lewis knew that he wanted to become a civil rights activist in 1955, after hearing a radio sermon on “Paul’s Letter to the American Christians” by an inspiring preacher named Martin Luther King. Roused by King’s willingness to call out white America’s indifference to racism, Lewis learned the theory and praxis of nonviolent resistance the hard way. Beaten repeatedly while integrating lunch counters and bus stations in the American south, he nevertheless remained devoted to hope that America would eventually create a genuine democracy for all of its citizens. Over the course of his life he was arrested no fewer than 40 times for various acts of nonviolent resistance, what he liked to call “good trouble.” After chairing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he won election to the US Congress where he served for more than 30 years. He also received a Lincoln Medal, a John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage” Lifetime Achievement Award, the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal and America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Lewis’s political career was catalysed by the violence at the Edmund Pettus bridge. Clubbed semiconscious by Sheriff Clark’s police, he refused to go to the Good Samaritan Hospital. Instead, at the Brown Chapel, he joined other marchers who had been beaten and tear gassed. The outraged young seminarian stepped into the pulpit and said to his comrades: “I don’t know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam. I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama.” This was greeted by cries of “Tell it!” and “Go on!” “Next time we march,” he added, “we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We may have to go on to Washington.”
When he got there, Lewis needed all of his Christian faith to deal with the cynicism in Washington. In the introduction to a 2012 book called Across That bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change he draws a clear distinction between the hard work of political change and the easy rhetoric of political gestures. “Remember how we thought the election of President Obama meant we had finally created a postracial America, a place where the problems that have haunted us for so long were finally silenced? Nobody says that anymore. We no longer dwell in that daydream.”
Among other systemic failings Lewis was struck by the tenacity of blind partisanship in the capital. “Political parties are on the hunt to search and destroy each other,” he wrote, “as though we were involved in some kind of enemy combat, rather than the work of statesmanship. Campaigns have become a free-for-all of dirty tricks, scandalmongering, and distracting negativity that obscures the people’s need to examine a candidate’s voting record and see where he or she actually stands on the issues.”
Lewis’s commitment to principled politics made him even more of an outlier in the Trump era. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie aptly describes him as an “Anti-Trump” – a man who dedicated his life to strengthening democracy instead treating it as a handicap to his personal ambition. In a week of glowing tributes, it may have been Lewis himself, in an Op-Ed penned shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer, who summed up his life’s work most eloquently. Celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement’s success at renewing America’s engagement with questions of social and racial justice, he wrote: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.” Such work must be done by “ordinary people with extraordinary vision” who recognise that “[t]he vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”
