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Democratic Reps. John Lewis of Georgia and Barbara Lee of California, 2010
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: Do you think the nation will take ownership of John Lewis’s legacy in a way that is not fleeting, but that endures?
Adam Harris: It was interesting because the day after John Lewis passed, I spoke with several pretty prominent figures, activists, politicians, and they all said that we need to make sure that we’re not only honoring him, but we’re emulating him in the way that we’re living. Particularly in this moment, when the country is having this national reckoning on race and you’ve seen bills moving in different states on police brutality. You’ve seen calls for things like shifting zoning laws and dealing with and addressing school segregation.
There’s some really practical things that people are thinking about right now in this moment that speak to that legacy, that speak to the sort of the quality that John Lewis spent his entire life fighting for.
Heffner: He was one of the Big Six and the last living member of that coalition, which of course included Farmer and King, I wonder how much Lewis thought towards the latter part of his life, that there had to be a succession plan for that Big Six, you know, folks like Reverend Barber and others who were activated in the society and discourse. During the Obama administration and for the last three decades, they have not been as apparent. Do you from your reporting have any sense of a feeling that there was sort of a lapse in the trajectory from Lewis and King and Farmer in the decades that followed or not so much?
I don’t know that it’s necessarily leaders that we need as much as kind of a collective understanding. That’s something that you had after the Civil War, that you had in the sixties.
Harris: I don’t know that there was a lapse. You did have activists at the grassroots level that were advancing this equality agenda. So, over the stretch of time from the sixties, the seventies and eighties, you had this handed-off baton, but you also had the consistency of John Lewis and the consistency of some of these elder statesmen like Jesse Jackson still being there.
What we’re saying now is in the aftermath of the Obama presidency, we’ve seen this shift to this Trump era where people are more acutely aware of some of the systemic inequities and the need to, not only kind of passively address them, but actively work to dismantle some of those systemic issues that lead you to the place we are now as a nation.
So where you’re seeing people like Stacey Abrams, you’re seeing people like Reverend Barber, that’s not only the fact that they’ve been pushing for this their entire lives, but that people are now listening to what they’ve had to say, that these causes aren’t just something that are happening in a vacuum that people are fighting for; but that America is now waking up to hearing what these activists are doing.
Heffner: I wonder if you think that the millennials and the Gen Z cohort is aware of what might have been missing in the preceding decades between King and Lewis and their rise and today.
Harris: There is a kind of looking at the long scope of history. So from right after the Civil War, we were thinking about Reconstruction. Then we think about this Second Reconstruction that we had in the 1960s. More than a new Big Six, we would need a third Reconstruction era. You have things like affirmative action that came along and they were positive—then, you have the Bakke case.
Then from 1976 to the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, you kind of have stagnant enrollments at highly selective higher-education institutions. Those are direct reflections of kind of a pushback to those legislative accomplishments. So I don’t know that it’s necessarily a situation where you need a single set of individuals. If you look at the Black Lives Matter movement, there’s no one single leader of that movement.
In the same way that John Lewis and Reverend King were trying to basically put America’s systemic issues kind of right in front of people, one of the things that the killing of George Floyd did was put all of the systemic issues right there for people.
You could see him laying on the ground, an officer pressing his knee into his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. That’s something that you can see, it’s visceral. One of the things that came out of the Kerner Commission in the sixties, after a wave of protests and riots was essentially, they were positing that the people who were more likely to see and witness systemic racism or systemic injustice, were more likely to rebel against it.
That’s something that you saw after during the King era, that’s something that you’re seeing right now. So I don’t know that it’s necessarily leaders that we need as much as kind of a collective understanding. And that’s something that you had after the Civil War, that you had in the sixties.
Heffner: The exception to those other two periods is the nature of the decentralized response. What can you say so far about the efficacy of the decentralized response in places like the Twin Cities?
Harris: I actually wouldn’t even limit it to places like the Twin Cities. Look at Connecticut which has actually been an interesting, kind of an interesting case study. They’ve had over the last several weeks not only protest against police brutalities, but, as I mentioned, protest against zoning laws, the kind of racist zoning laws that have locked Black people into impoverished communities. That movement had been building over time.
This moment has allowed those grassroots organizations that have been building to have a wave of support. There are people who are now willing to listen to what they had to say. Now when they say, hey, police brutality is happening in these areas because Black people are locked into these areas, then those areas are now over-policed.
It’s like all of these factors are working together. Those areas where the Black people have been locked into have lower housing prices, which means that fewer property tax dollars go to the schools. It’s kind of an acknowledgment of all of these interlocking factors.
