Editor’s Note: The following review first appeared in The Arts Fuse on February 13, 2025. It has been republished here with permissions.
John Lewis: A Life
Simon & Schuster
696 pages, $35
As a fiction writer, I have always regarded biographies with a combination of awe and wariness. Awe, because really good biographies are filled with myriad details that often require years of meticulous research, and wariness, because the details can overwhelm the story and you, the reader, can find yourself searching for the trajectory of a life that will stay with you forever. Writing biography is a delicate balancing act, one not often achieved, and it seems to me that the really great biographies—e.g., “John Adams” and “Truman” by David McCullough, Taylor Branch’s work on Martin Luther King Jr., W. Jackson Bate’s “John Keats,” Quentin Bell’s study of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Michael Reynolds’ biography of Hemingway, and Martin Duberman’s “Paul Robeson,” to name a few—are suffused with a mysterious ingredient, a sense of intimacy that is always the mark of a great work of literature, be it a novel or a biography.
And now we are lucky to have this biography of John Lewis, a work of art that can join those mentioned above. Since the eruption of interest in the Black experience in America after the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been a backlash against “the Black story.” Yet here is this new book, just when we need it the most. For David Greenberg has brought to life not only one unusual man but also the tumultuous racial history of our country in the second half of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century.
The book begins in Troy, Ga., where Lewis, the third child of Willie Mae Carter and Eddie Lewis, was born in 1940:
As a child, John Lewis stood out among his siblings for his love of reading. ‘He was always kind of a peculiar boy,’ his father, Eddie, said in a 1969 interview. ‘Now, you take a lot of times when the children would all be playing, he got some kind of book. And he would be messing with that book . . . reading or doing something with it.’ …
‘He had a poem’ that he would recite, recalled Ethel Mae. ‘I don’t know the name of it, but it began, “Out of the night that covers me ,,,” When my momma and daddy would go to town or something and leave us all here, then he would start.’
The poem was ‘Invictus,’ a Victorian verse by William Ernest Henley, whose words eerily presaged Lewis’s trials later in life. [Page 3]
Then Greenberg quotes the whole poem, including the relevant lines, “Under the bludgeoning of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed, and ending with that famous couplet, “I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul.” Like many of my generation who not only know the poem but have lived by it, I was hooked and wanted to know how this “peculiar” boy became one of the most influential Americans of his time.
His parents had brought him up to stay under the radar, but John Lewis’ heart and head told him that was not where he belonged; from early adulthood, he knew that he had to fight not only for racial justice but for justice for everyone—Jews, the Latinos, the Asians, gay and transgender people—whoever was left on the fringe and/or disenfranchised. But he had to do it in his way, always guided by the principle of nonviolence. The same principle that guided Martin Luther King Jr. until his assassination in 1968 and the same principle Lewis advocated for more than 40 years until his death in 2020. Not easy when there were people with clubs and dogs and guns surrounding you, or when all across the South people would gather to see a lynching, as if it were a performance.
As the story unfolds in Greenberg’s highly capable hands, we learn that there were many times when Lewis could have succumbed, not only to violence, but also to apathy. It was often hard to pull his weight, especially when he was a young man: He was physically unprepossessing, medium height with a tendency towards bulky, dark skinned, socially awkward, with a slight speech impediment that made public speaking hard. Hardly a hale fellow, well met, so not always welcomed into the various cliques he would encounter. Essentially, if truth be told, a loner.
But a loner with a mission. Never losing sight of his goal, and prepared to stand up for his ideals through disappointments and hurts and downright ridicule. As we follow his personal struggles, we also learn about the internecine struggles in such groups as SNCC; the Voter Education Project; Lewis’s work under the Carter administration in ACTION, which was responsible for running the VISTA program; and finally his time on the Atlanta City Council. Greenberg’s clear eye helps the reader untangle the sometimes complicated dynamic among those fighters for racial justice, like Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X and Bayard Rustin and James Farmer and James Forman and Andrew Young and Louis Farrakhan and the Kennedys, as well as those in more recent times, like the Clintons and the Obamas. And how Lewis, though not as famous as some of his peers in the early years, was in the middle of it all, and an active participant in the decisions made.
There were setbacks. Although possessed of enormous energy when motivated, Lewis sometimes became so exhausted that he fell into a “funk.” So acute was his depression that he had to be ordered to take bed rest. This happened in the early summer of 1968 when he, like the rest of the country, was reeling from the assassinations of MLK and Bobby Kennedy within the space of two months. While Nixon was receiving the nomination at the Republican convention in 1968, Lewis was in the Holy Family Hospital in Atlanta, despairing of what was to come. By then he and a young librarian named Lillian Miles had gone out a few times and were friends. But John was relatively unsophisticated and not regarded as marriage material. Still, Lillian cheered him up when she brought his mail and the morning newspaper. As Greenberg tells it:
Theirs had not exactly been a whirlwind romance; Lewis had been traveling with the [Democratic] campaign and he was anything but a skilled romancer of wom-en. But she brought stability to his life and made him feel confident.
Lillian believed she had caught Lewis at a moment of vulnerability, when he des-perately needed someone. One day, while lying in his bed, he said to her, “Why don’t we get married?” It was far from the most sentimental proposal, but Lillian accepted. [Page 279]
It was to change his life. Her love and support would give him the courage he needed; they became a team as he entered the wider arena of local politics in Georgia and finally was elected to Congress in 1986. Her sharp political instincts, her unflinching loyalty, and her often steely judgment would sustain him until her death at 73 in 2012. Even if Lillian’s strong opinions and sometimes outrageous sense of privilege created conflict with his staff, John was always loyal. “She picked up a country boy,” he said toward the end of his life, “and helped me build an incredible life” [Page 446].
As he weaves the tapestry of that incredible life, Greenberg is not shy about pointing out Lewis’ flaws: how stubborn or rigid or, on a lighter note, how vain he could be. Yet, as we watch Lewis become more and more powerful, we can see Greenberg’s growing respect, indeed love, for his subject who had a wonderful sense of humor and loved mischief and was so attentive not only to his staff and their families but to everyone who crossed his path. Perhaps most important was Lewis’ humility:
Stories abound about Lewis’s refusal to avail himself of the privileges of status. He never acquired airs. He declined to let aides carry his bags or fetch him a glass of water … he signed letters by hand … If the receptionist had gone home, Lewis would answer the phone … he knew the people who were wiping down the sinks in the ladies’ room … who were cooking the food in the cafeteria. [Pages 449-450]
And then there was his curiosity, his “joy in the ordinary pursuits,” like gardening, stamp collecting, acquiring art and books, shopping with Lillian, hunting for antiques. “Deep down,” said his chief aide and close friend Michael Collins, “he’s still the little boy from the farm” [Page 448].
One of the most painful and poignant stories woven through this book that has so many interesting threads is the tale of Lewis’ friendship with the handsome and popular Black politician Julian Bond. The families were best friends, Alice Bond and Lillian were close, and the Bond children always welcoming to John Miles, the Lewis’ only child. It came to a turning point when they both ran in the primary for Democratic congressman from Georgia in 1985, a fight that at first seemed futile for Lewis, but one he eventually won, securing the seat in the House of Representatives that he would occupy until his death. Yet, that victory had a bittersweet cost; his friendship with Bond was fatally altered and would never again have the traction it once had.
In 2019, Lewis realized that “something isn’t right,” and it was discovered that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. He knew what the illness could do, having watched Lillian’s battle with kidney disease. Yet his instinct was to fight. The press release he sent out says it best:
I have been in some kind of fight—for freedom, equality, basic human rights—for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now …
While I am clear-eyed about the prognosis, doctors have told me … that I have a fighting chance.
So I have decided to do what I know to do and do what I have always done: I am going to fight it and keep fighting for the Beloved Community. We still have many bridges to cross. [Page 541]
This man who had said, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America,” was finally nearing the end of his life. Through it all, as Greenberg emphasizes towards the end of the book, “Lewis never compromised his commitment to nonviolence. To his aide Brenda Jones he said, ‘Brenda, the longer I live, the more I come to believe that nonviolence is an immutable principle, which never should be violated.’” [Page 553] He was still “the captain of his soul.”
So I urge you to take a break from the news and read every word of this superb book. It will inspire you and help you to meet the challenges now facing our country, challenges that might have surprised even the stalwart John Lewis, were he still alive. Our task now is to heed his advice and peacefully seek to preserve “The Beloved Community.”
