His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope
Jon Meacham
Copyright © 2020 by Merewether LLC
Afterword copyright © 2020 by the Estate of John Lewis
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
As the Trump administration exits, ending a reign of discord and division marked by the unleashing of a kind of racial bias many progressive whites mistakenly imagined had been effectively banished from the land, we now have the opportunity for a critical do-over. And I can’t think of a more pertinent, more moving book for these times than “His Truth Is Marching On.”
We lost civil rights leader John Lewis this year in the midst of intersecting crises: the virulence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the resultant collapse of our economy and the remarkable multiracial outpouring into the streets by Americans appalled by the continuing murder of people of color by our police.
An academic at heart, Meacham explains that his “is not a full-scale biography. It is, rather, an appreciative account of the major moments of Lewis’s life in the movement, of the theological understanding he brought to the struggle, and of the utility of that vision as America enters the third decade of the twenty-first century amid division and fear.” He neglects to say that “His Truth Is Marching On” can bring you to tears or acknowledge that he, a Southern white man, so successfully forces us to face the utter inhumanity of segregation, to appreciate those Black men and women who, with a few white allies, time and again risked their lives to make America not great but merely decent.
Unfortunately, I can only share a small percentage of the critically important moments Meacham brings to life for us, so please get yourself a copy.
Meacham sets the stage: “For John Lewis, slavery wasn’t an abstraction. It was as real to him as his great-grandfather, Frank Carter … [who] had been born into enslavement in Pike County, Alabama, in 1862.”
After a brief fit of Reconstruction freedom, when Blacks voted and won office, slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow: “By 1901, when Frank Carter was nearly forty, white Alabama had reverted as much as it could to an antebellum order by legalizing segregation, circumscribing suffrage, and banning interracial marriage.” And Meacham reminds us that Black life could just as easily be snuffed out under segregation, as slavery and social, economic and civic power resided only with whites:
“He always remembered those hands, particularly Willie Mae Lewis’s fingers — fingers split and hardened by years in the cotton fields. Her son honored her endurance, even marveled at it. Yet he also recoiled from a way of life that put struggling people out under the Southern sun, hunched over and compelled, season after season, decade after decade, to eke out a living while fingers bled and muscles ached. Later in life, he was horrified to realize that his parents had made $1.40 for every four hundred pounds of cotton — and it took a person about two days to pick that four hundred pounds.”
Segregation, fueled by hatred, was enforced by violence, arbitrary and unendingly vicious: “In June 1940, when John Lewis was four months old, Jesse Thornton, a twenty-six-year-old churchgoing African American man who lived twenty miles away from Troy, in Luverne, Alabama, was standing outside a black barbershop when a white Luverne police officer walked by. Thornton allegedly failed to address the policeman with the honorific ‘Mister.’ Thornton wasn’t thinking, or at least wasn’t thinking the way a black man was supposed to think under a regime of white supremacy. He was lynched, his corpse dumped in a nearby swamp …”
Only when we appreciate the enormity, yet normality, of the evil forced upon Black Americans can we fully grasp the bravery of those who said no, refused to move to the back of the bus, sat in lunch-counter seats reserved for whites, who registered to vote, and appreciate the varied ways men and women of color chose to survive the always-present racial hatred and lack of equal opportunity:
“‘Change, as I learned back when I was growing up, was not something my parents were ever very comfortable with,’ Lewis recalled. ‘Theirs was, as the Bible says, a straight and narrow way.’ His father, Eddie, had started out as a sharecropper … ‘Working for nothing, that’s what I would tell my mother we were doing … I know it upset her and my father. I carried my load, I did my duties, but I also spoke my mind, and even today my mother shakes her head at what an irritating habit that was.’”
Nevertheless, Meacham notes: “Her spirit, he remembered, was unbreakable. It propelled her through the years, and long afterward Lewis came to see that the character of the woman whose fingers worked and worked and worked foreshadowed what drove her son to march and march and march.”
Life was never easy for the family: “Lewis’s father was ambitious for his family and, in 1944, after saving $300, he bought 110 acres … The family raised cotton, corn, peanuts, and chickens, and the task of picking the cotton remained brutal … The house was small — just three rooms, counting the kitchen. There were cracks between the floorboards, no electricity, and water came from a well by the porch …”
Religion was central but the family could only make it to church once or twice a month, traveling miles over roads that, with rain, turned into “‘impassable quagmires,’ Lewis recalled. ‘And these were people who worked their fingers to the bone week in and week out … But once or twice a month, that was a joy’ … In a harsh and segregated world — Lewis remembered seeing only two white people in his childhood, the mailman and a single traveling salesman — the church was comforting and restorative.”
To get to segregated Banks Junior High School, he rode hand-me-down school buses on unpaved roads. Lewis was 14 when the Supreme Court acknowledged in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated education was inherently unequal: “‘I wanted to jump for joy … I kept expecting that one day when I climbed onto my school bus I might see some white students on board or maybe a new friend might just sit down beside me.’ That never happened.”
Meacham writes: “Looking back, Lewis understood that he had grown up more quickly than most. ‘In most ways it was a hard life, a serious life, and I was a serious child,’ he recalled. ‘When it comes down to it, I don’t really feel I ever had a childhood. I feel childhood just passed me by.’”
A year later, 14-year-old Emmett Till was shot and beaten to death after a white woman falsely claimed that he had grabbed her: “Moses Wright, Till’s great-uncle, bravely testified against the killers, but to no avail in a trial with an all-white jury …’ Lewis recalled. ‘It was so terrifying. I remember the pictures’ … The killing stayed in his mind for the rest of his life …”
Then, on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress at a local department store was arrested for refusing to move from a seat in the white-only section on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Soon, the black community joined together to boycott city buses. “‘I can still say without question that the Montgomery bus boycott changed my life more than any other event before or since,’ Lewis recalled … To Lewis, the boycott was faith in action, the gospel moving from the pulpit to the streets … from word to deed …” (Emphasis added.)
Hearing Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio “was as though a light turned on in my heart … I felt he was talking directly to me. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to be just like him.’” King preached: “In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for injustices that he has heaped upon you … such a stand will require willingness to suffer and sacrifice … Sometimes it might mean going to jail. If such is the case you must honorably grace the jail with your presence … [And] if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing could be more Christian.”
While John Lewis’ grades weren’t good enough to attend King’s Morehouse, he was admitted to American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, where he could work off his tuition washing pots and pans in the kitchen. Founded in 1924 to train black ministers, ABT “tended to favor a focus on the City of God rather than on the City of Man … Lewis, though, would say to his classmates: ‘I think we need to be less concerned with getting people up to those streets paved with gold and more concerned about what people are dealing with right down here on the streets of Nashville.’”
Soon after, he heard the Rev. James Morris Lawson Jr. preach: “Nonviolent revolution … seeks to transform human life in both private and public forms … [and] maintains balance between tearing down and building up, destroying and planting.”
Lawson trained Lewis and his fellow students in the practical strategies of civil disobedience: “‘He showed us how to curl our bodies so that our internal organs would escape direct blows,’ Lewis recalled. ‘It was not enough to resist the urge to strike back at an assailant. That urge can’t be there … You have to do more than just not hit back. You have to have no desire to hit back. You have to love that person who’s hitting you … And we accepted it, most of us accepted it, as a way of life …’”
In April 1960, Ella Baker, working with both King’s group — the Southern Christian Leadership Conference — and the NAACP, helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Guided by principles drafted by James Lawson: “Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate … hope ends despair. Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt … Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes systems of gross social immorality.”
Jon Meacham is, as John Lewis was, a religious man. He sees the life John Lewis lived through the lens of faith. Lewis was raised with the sense that God was there, and was watching. Conscious of his mother’s creed: “Work and put your trust in God, and God’s gonna take care of his children. God’s gonna take care of his children.”
The church was central to the struggle. The songs of the movement were direct descendants of the hymns that helped generations survive the plantations. For better or worse, God has managed to elude me and so, all these years later, I don’t know enough about religion to agree/disagree with Meacham:
“John Robert Lewis embodied the traits of a saint in the classical Christian sense of the term … One need not embrace Catholic practice and doctrine to benefit from the contemplation of men and women who, in the words of an old hymn, ‘toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew.’ One test of a saint, closely tied to the test of a martyr, is the willingness to suffer and die for others. Which Lewis was willing to do — again and again and again.” (Emphasis added.)
Having, in my movement days, experienced the sting of tear gas, the pain of a billy club, of having coffee flung at me, it was extraordinarily hard for me to endure abuse without fighting back, so I have no problem believing there’s a certain kind of saintliness in the sustained practice of civil disobedience. To this day I marvel at the conviction, the discipline, yes, the faith, of those who sat in, rode the buses of the Freedom Rides knowing full well the mobs were waiting.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Meacham for bringing the first lunch counter sit-ins to life once more. Begun in North Carolina, organizers reached out to John Lewis and other SNCC members in Nashville for support. Even though they were warned that a small mob of whites was determined to stop them, and that Nashville police wouldn’t protect them, they persevered.
“‘Go home, nigger!’ was the cry that greeted Lewis … ‘Get back to Africa!’ … ‘What’s the matter? You chicken?’ they said as Lewis and his compatriots silently pressed on to take their seats. Lewis was hit in the ribs and knocked to the floor. There was pulling, punching, and jabbing; some burned the students with lit cigarettes … [Then] the city police arrived. ‘As the young men who had beaten us looked on and cheered,’ Lewis recalled, ‘we were told that we were under arrest for ‘disorderly conduct.’ The students met their fate not stoically but joyfully, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as they were marched into the paddy wagon for the trip to the city jail. ‘That was the first time that I was arrested, and growing up in the rural South it was not the thing to do — to go to jail,’ Lewis said. ‘It would bring shame and disgrace on the family. But for me, I tell you, it was like being involved in a holy crusade. It became a badge of honor.” He recalled the moment in religious terms; he was not humiliated but exalted, not captive but free:
“‘That paddy wagon — crowded, cramped, dirty, with wire cage windows and doors — seemed like a chariot to me, a freedom vehicle carrying me across a threshold. I had wondered all along, as anyone would, how I would handle the reality of what I had studied and trained and prepared for for so long, what it would be like to actually face pain and rage and the power of uniformed authority. Now I knew. Now I had crossed over … It was like deliverance. I had, as they say in Christian circles when a person accepts Jesus Christ into his heart, come home. But this was not Jesus I had come home to. It was the purity and utter certainty of the nonviolent path.”
Meacham reminds us: “In February 1961 he marked his twenty-first birthday in the Nashville jail after being arrested for ‘standing in,’ or peacefully picketing, the city’s segregated movie theaters … There was more bloodshed as white counter-protesters struck outside the theaters — cracked ribs, a head wound.”
On May 20, 1961, Lewis participated in the effort to integrate interstate bus travel: “As they reached Montgomery’s Greyhound station … the police escorts and a highway patrol plane that had seen them out of Birmingham and along the highway disappeared. The bus, and the Riders, were alone … ‘It was so quiet, so peaceful — nothing … The moment we started down the steps off of that bus … an angry mob — they grew into about two to three thousand people — came out of nowhere: men, women, children with baseball bats, clubs, chains and they literally — there was no police official around — they just started beating people …’”
Lewis was knocked unconscious: “‘I could feel my knees collapsing and then nothing … I literally thought it was the last march. It was the last Freedom Ride,’ Lewis recalled … ‘I was bleeding pretty badly from the back of my head. I couldn’t believe how much blood there was.’”
They took refuge in the First Baptist Church: “By four-thirty on the morning of Monday, May 22, 1961, the siege had broken … Everyone was exhausted. But Lewis and the Riders weren’t done. It was time, they decided, to press on to Mississippi … At the Jackson, Mississippi, bus station, Lewis walked into the whites-only restroom, stood at a urinal, and was quickly arrested. Convicted of breaching the peace, he was sentenced to sixty days in jail. He spent a couple of weeks at the Hinds County prison farm and then, in the darkness of night on Thursday, June 15, 1961, Lewis and his brethren were herded into a windowless truck. They were being taken to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi state penitentiary, a place William Faulkner once summed up in a single phrase: ‘destination doom.’
“‘We have bad niggers here,’ Parchman’s superintendent, Fred Jones, a Sunflower County planter, told the prisoners … ‘Niggers on death row that’ll beat you up and cut you as soon as look at you … Sing your goddamned Freedom Songs now … Won’t do you a bit of good here.’”
They spent nearly a month at Parchman. “‘We were led into a cement building where deputies with cattle prods stood by while we were ordered to strip naked. For two and a half hours we stood wearing nothing … an attempt to break us down, to humiliate and dehumanize us, to rob us of our identity and self-worth … On one occasion a fire hose was brought in and we were blasted with jets of water. Giant fans were then set up and turned on full blast, freezing us in our flooded cells … The people who were together at Parchman — we grew up in that time there together … We grew tougher, we grew wiser.’”
Meacham reminds us that faith inspired and sustained them: “‘The nonviolent movement of the early 1960s was indeed a spiritual movement,’ Diane Nash recalled. ‘[But] for many of us, it was also a matter of logic. Had we, in the 1960s South, responded with violence, I fully believe that we would have been mowed down by gunfire. We wanted to create not just the end of segregation, but in the process we wanted to have a community of increased tolerance and love and understanding. If you had violence, it would have just escalated. We knew that segregation was tough. It had been in place for one hundred years — and we knew that if we wanted to get rid of it, we had to be willing to go to jail, to suffer — and, yes, to die.’ (Emphasis added.)
On June 12, 1963, President Kennedy told America that our moral crisis about race “cannot be met by repressive police action” or “left to increased demonstrations in the streets.” That night Medgar Evers, a Mississippi NAACP official, was assassinated by the Klan. Meacham shares Lewis’ recollections: “‘It was hard to keep up with events and emotions at the pace they were tumbling that week’ … What the sit-ins and Freedom Rides had set in motion was gaining ferocious, even dizzying, speed, and the forces of fear and hate were taking their stand against hope and love …” John Lewis was unanimously elected chairman of SNCC and, soon after, stood in tribute as the train bearing Medgar Evers’ body passed through Atlanta on its way to Arlington National Cemetery. (Emphasis added.)
Still, the saint was so very human. We learn Lewis “could be strangely childlike — he did not drive, had no girlfriends to speak of, and eschewed liquor and hell-raising. Preternaturally serious, he seemed gifted with the weight of wisdom. ‘I’m not impetuous … I stay the course. I was that way when I was eight, and I’m that way today. I am not without passion; in fact, I have a very strong sense of passion. But my passion plays itself out in a deep, patient way …’
“He remained at a remove from his family. ‘During that period, my mother would say, “You went to Nashville to get an education, but you’re involved in that mess.” That’s the way she talked about the movement — ‘that mess.’ Later, I think I convinced her that it was a call — it was the will of God Almighty.’ Mae Lewis Tyner, a younger sister of Lewis’s, remembered their mother praying for ‘Robert.’ ‘She’d be in the kitchen, washing the dishes, and just praying for him,’ Mae Tyner recalled. Their father covered his worry with resolute optimism. ‘Bob’s going to be all right …’
Unbeknownst to most of us who attended the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom, Meacham recounts the intense pressure put on Lewis and SNCC to be politic and not jeopardize support for a civil rights bill. President Kennedy even had someone posted, able to cut off the microphone just in case.
Today, the march is mostly known for King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, but Meacham reminds us of the power of Lewis’ remarks: “‘While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, twelve hours a day. While we stand here, there are students in jail on trumped-up charges. We come here today with a great sense of misgiving …
“‘It is true that we support the administration’s civil rights bill,’ he said … [But] we need a bill that will provide for the homeless and starving people of this nation. We need a bill that will ensure the equality of a maid who earns five dollars a week in the home of a family whose total income is $100,000 dollars a year …
“‘To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now … We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again … How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now … I appeal to all of you to get in this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes … If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our march into Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham.’
“At the roll call of flashpoints, the crowd applauded. ‘But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today. By the forces of our demands, our determination, and our numbers, we shall send a desegregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them together in the image of God and Democracy. We must say wake up America, wake up! For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.’”
Looking back, it is clear that hate was more intransigent that any of us involved in the movement would have liked or appreciated at the time. Or as Meacham the historian puts it: “The history of the twentieth century would be nobler if we could say that the March on Washington was in real time what it has become in retrospect: a clear turning point that brought white America to the recognition that, as King had said, it was time to include all, not just some, in the Jeffersonian creed of liberty.”
“But,” Meacham emphasizes, “our story is not so noble, nor is it so straightforward …”
As if to drive home how elusive change was, less than a month later on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, the Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair. King preached: “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil … And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”
“‘[But] There were many who felt bitter, many who felt let down,’ Lewis recalled … ‘The bombing gave the debate over nonviolence new resonance … That was always a question during the movement,’ Lewis recalled. ‘After the church bombing — after so many violent episodes, and there were so many, in so many different places, all over the South — people would say, ‘How can nonviolence defeat violence? The Klansmen don’t go to funerals, we’re the ones who go to funerals.’ But we couldn’t give up. Violence was not an option for us — not if we wanted to prevail, not if we wanted the Beloved Community.” …
On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, there was another audacious killing, this time the assassination of the president. “‘I felt sick,’ Lewis recalled. ‘I didn’t know what to do … I felt lost — faint, really … I felt as if I was watching them all — Medgar Evers, the little girls in Birmingham, and now this … So much sorrow.”
It’s a bit mind-boggling to reexperience the ‘60s as history retold, and I must say I’ve experienced a kind of PTSD. First of all, it’s remarkable to counterpose the continuing violence alongside the indomitable perseverance of John Lewis. And only because we’re in the midst of COVID-19, where the deaths have reached numbers that defy comprehension, do the deaths of the ‘60s seem somehow manageable; at the time, they were crippling: girls attending church, Freedom Summer’s Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman registering voters, Malcolm, Martin, RFK.
“‘We truly believed that we were on God’s side, and in spite of everything — the beatings, the bombings, the burnings — God’s truth would prevail,” Lewis recalled … ‘To me, ‘doing something’ meant to keep on keeping on,” he recalled. “To others, however, it meant changing directions, taking another tack. Out of frustration, bitterness, outright hostility to the system, to the government, to white people in general, every day the more radical arm of the movement was swelling a little more.” As early as 1962, Lewis recalled, “You heard the term ‘revolution’ more than the word ‘integration.’ The spirit of redemptive love was being pushed aside by a spirit of rage.”
While most Americans connect John Lewis with the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965, most are unaware of the events that led up to the march. The effort to register black voters had been met by vigorous opposition from local authorities, including Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark.
During one peaceful demonstration, Clark and his deputies forced 160 teenagers and children to run 2 miles, beating and cattle-prodding them along the way … Then a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young veteran who was trying to help his mother. She had been attacked by a group of whites in a café in Marion, Alabama, after leaving a voting rights meeting. Jimmie Lee Jackson died eight days later …
As Lewis and James Bevel walked together on the procession to bury Jackson, Bevel suggested they walk the 54 miles to take Jimmie Lee’s body from Selma to the capitol steps in Montgomery. Though that didn’t happen, they did decide to march: “‘We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma,’ King said. Some in SNCC thought King and SCLC were putting too much emphasis on legislation. But Lewis was steadfast in his support of the Selma activists: “‘If these people want to march, I’m going to march with them.’”
Jon Meacham brings the critical confrontation to life: While George Wallace authorized his state troopers to do whatever was necessary to prevent the march, 625 marchers made it to the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Meacham writes: “John Lewis’s life reached a kind of crescendo. He was still so young — he had turned twenty-five two weeks before — and yet there on that strip of road he was like a martyr or a prophet of old. For all the complexities of race and identity and power and love and hate, for all the dreams fulfilled and dreams deferred, for all the panoply and pain of history, this much, at least, was simple at that hour and that place in Selma: The forces of good were pitted against the forces of evil. The marchers were asking a nation to live up to its word that all were created equal, and the nation, in the form of those troopers and deputies and demonstrators, was saying, as Sheriff Clark’s lapel pin put it, ‘Never’ … (Emphasis added.)
“Lewis recalled. ‘We were there. We were not going to run … These people were ready to be arrested, but I didn’t want anyone to get hurt … There was only one option left that I could see. We should kneel and pray,’ Lewis said to a nodding Williams. They wouldn’t have time … Within seconds — to Lewis it seemed instantaneous — the wave of blue struck. He remembered the enormity, the totality, of the reaction of his attackers. ‘The troopers and possemen swept forward as one, like a human wave, a blur of blue shirts and billy clubs and bullwhips,’ Lewis recalled. ‘We had no chance to turn and retreat.’ The pain was to be endured. There was no help for it …
“‘They came with all types of force, beating us with nightsticks, trampling us with horses. I was the first person to be hit. My feet, my legs went from under me. I was knocked down’ … Lewis felt everything dimming. He vomited and was struck a second time when he tried to get up. He could hear screams and slurs and the clop-clop-clop of the troopers’ horses. His skull fractured, his vision blurred, Lewis believed the end had come. ‘People are going to die here,” he said to himself. “I’m going to die here.” Yet for Lewis there was no sense of panic, no gasping, no thrashing, no fear. He was at peace. ‘At the moment when I was hit on the bridge and began to fall,’ Lewis recalled, ‘I really thought it was my last protest, my last march. I thought I saw death, and I thought, “It’s OK, it’s all right” — I am doing what I am supposed to do’ …
“It was war … A Negro screamed: ‘Tear gas!’ Within seconds the highway was swirling with white and yellow clouds of smoke, raging with the cries of men. Choking, bleeding, the Negroes fled in all directions while the whites pursued them. The mounted men uncoiled bullwhips and lashed out viciously as the horses’ hoofs trampled the fallen. ‘O.K., nigger!’ snarled a posseman, flailing away at a running Negro woman. ‘You wanted to march — now march!’”
A former medic in the Air Force created a makeshift stretcher and got Lewis to the hospital. I was one of those who watched on television and, days later, found myself on one of many buses as thousands answered King’s call. I walked the last stretch into Montgomery, thousands singing “Oh Wallace, you never can jail us all. Oh Wallace, segregation is gonna fall” past cheering supporters in the streets then to a cordon of pissed off state troopers lining the wide street to the capitol.
Meaham explains: “It is difficult to overstate Selma’s significance … what sets Selma apart — what sets Lewis’s years of contributions during the movement apart — is that Selma became Selma not because of a conventional clash of forces but because the conventions of history were turned upside down. Lexington and Concord featured armed combatants; Appomattox is shorthand for the end of a civil war that claimed about three quarters of a million lives. Selma changed hearts and minds when Americans watched the brutal forces of the visible world meet the forces of an invisible one, and the clubs and horses and tear gas were, in the end, no match for love and grace and nonviolence.” (Emphasis added.)
Meacham appreciates the difference between the historian, the observer and the saintly activist: “Change in America most often comes when the powerless attract the attention of the powerful. From a pragmatic perspective, that process is perennial, with fits and starts, advances and retreats, good days and bleak ones. In such a view — and it was one shared by many of the American Founders — history is contingent, a succession of compromises and improvisations, world without end. To Lewis, though, history was terminal — and it will end not in despair and dust but in hope and harmony, with the coming of the Beloved Community. To him, then, politics was not an end but a means to bring about a world in which, in the words of the prophet Micah, every man shall dwell under his own vine and fig tree and no one shall make him afraid.”
I’ll leave it to you to read about Lewis’ defeat for the chairmanship of SNCC by Stokely Carmichael, the critical and, I believe, unfortunate shift in the movement from a steadfast commitment to nonviolence to an embrace of what, at that moment, seemed a more necessary and militant response to racist violence and the war in Vietnam.
Clearly the rise in hate crimes, the sight of white nationalists marching unapologetically in American streets, points to the sad reality that so many of the hopes and dreams of the civil rights movement remain unfulfilled — that, in fact, freedom is a constant struggle that needs to be fought and won again and again.
Lewis, as you know, never stopped, never surrendered. There he is at Black Lives Matter Plaza, so encouraged by the multiracial multitudes who flooded the streets of our cities and small towns to protest the unnecessary deaths of people of color at the hands of police, an almost spontaneous movement so very reminiscent of the movement he helped to steer.
John Lewis had a message to those who would be reading “His Truth Is Marching On”: “We chose community once, in the 1960s, and I believe we can choose community once more … Fear is abroad in the land, and we must gather the forces of hope and march once more …
“’I have long believed — I have long preached — that our nation’s moral compass comes from God, it is of God, and it is seen through God. And God so loved the world that he gave us the countless men and women who lost their homes and their jobs for the right to vote. God gave us the children of freedom who lost their lives in a bombing in Birmingham and the three young men who were killed in Mississippi. But above all else God gave us courage — the power to believe that what I call the Spirit of History behind us is stronger than the terror of hatred in front of us. That is what I believed then. And I believe it now …’”
Meacham writes: “Taken together with sit-ins to integrate lunch counters and other public facilities and Freedom Rides to integrate interstate travel, the Selma march, Lewis recalled, ‘injected something very special into the soul and the heart and the veins of America. It said, in effect, that we must humanize our social and political and economic structure. When people saw what happened on that bridge, there was a sense of revulsion all over America.” Revulsion, then redemption: Is there anything more American? “Redemption — redemption is everything,” Lewis said. “It is what we pray for. It is what we march for.”
“His Truth Is Marching On” is beautifully written. John Lewis was a remarkable man and he made the right choice trusting Jon Meacham to do him, his story and ours the justice it deserves.
