Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
John Lewis stands at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, 50 years after he was beaten there on Bloody Sunday in 1965.
In 1965, as chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 25-year-old John Lewis led 600 protesters on the first march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, to intensify pressure on Congress to pass a federal voting rights law. Alabama state troopers, ordered to Selma by segregationist Gov. George Wallace, attacked the marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis was beaten so severely that his skull was fractured. “I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die,” Lewis recalled later. That day, March 7, 1965, came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” and television coverage of the massacre stirred the public’s conscience. Six months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
Lewis would later become a 17-term member of Congress from Atlanta, and on Friday, he died of cancer at the age of 80. That night, Americans watched federal troops, sent by Donald Trump, invade Portland, Oregon, following 50 days of protest against police violence and racial injustice. Peaceful protesters were arrested, forced into unmarked cars, and detained in jail, despite the insistence by Oregon’s governor and Portland’s mayor that the troops were violating civil liberties and inflaming the situation, and should leave. At least one protester suffered a fractured skull at the hands of troops, just as Lewis did 55 years earlier. The Portland massacre is likely a trial run for similar actions in other cities. It is too soon to know if public outrage over Trump’s assault on basic rights will help stir voters to defeat him in November.
In 1965, Lewis was a young radical, impatient with the pace of change around racial injustice. At his death, he was still a radical, supportive of the new generation of activists and the upsurge of protests around the country since the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in March. Had he not been ill with cancer, he almost certainly would have participated in Black Lives Matter protests. As he told CBS in June about the nonviolent protest moment, “There will be no turning back.”
In a new documentary film, John Lewis: Good Trouble, scheduled for broadcast on CNN this fall, Lewis explained that he’d been arrested at least 45 times—five times since he was elected to Congress in 1986.
“My philosophy is very simple,” Lewis says in the film. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something. Do something. Get in trouble. Good trouble.”
Lewis’s physical and spiritual courage would be tested many times. Each time, he revealed a remarkable, calm discipline, galvanizing others to follow his lead.
Soon after Donald Trump was elected president, Lewis told an NBC interviewer that “I don’t see the president-elect as a legitimate president.” The next day, Trump responded over Twitter, saying Lewis was “All talk, talk, talk—no action or results. Sad.”
It is likely that Trump had no idea he was attacking one of the most admired figures in American history. But within hours after Trump’s tweet, sales of Lewis’s autobiography, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, spiked by nearly 106,020 percent, moving the book from the 15,918th spot to 2nd on Amazon’s bestsellers list. Thanks to Trump’s misstep, more people learned about Lewis’s remarkable life.
LEWIS WAS BORN into a large family of sharecroppers in rural Alabama. At 15, he heard Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons on the family radio during the Montgomery bus boycott and decided to become a minister. Suffering from a speech impediment, he practiced preaching to chickens in his parents’ barnyard and at local Baptist churches. At 17, after becoming the first member of his family to graduate from high school, he attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, which allowed students to work in lieu of tuition. He worked as a janitor and simultaneously attended the all-Black Fisk University, graduating with degrees from the seminary and the university.
In 1958, Lewis attended a weekend retreat at the Highlander Folk School, a training center for activists in rural Tennessee, where veteran activists helped him visualize what could happen if thousands of poor working people were galvanized into direct action. “I left Highlander on fire,” Lewis recalled.
When he returned to Nashville, he joined other students to ask local stores to voluntarily desegregate. When they refused, the students began preparing for civil disobedience, drawing from the work of James Lawson, a divinity student at Vanderbilt University, who taught workshops on nonviolent social action. In February 1960, Lewis participated in one of the first lunch counter sit-ins. Day after day, Lewis and other students—Black and white—sat silently at Woolworth’s and other lunch counters, where they were harassed, spat upon, beaten, arrested, and held in jail. The students insisted that they continue, and Lewis played a key leadership role. Eventually Nashville’s mayor and business leaders agreed to desegregate the downtown stores—the first Southern city to do so.
“My philosophy is very simple,” John Lewis said recently. “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, say something. Do something. Get in trouble. Good trouble.”
In 1961, Lewis joined the first Freedom Ride, which left Washington, D.C., on May 4 for New Orleans, protesting the segregation of interstate bus terminals. When the riders reached Rock Hill, South Carolina, Lewis tried to enter a whites-only waiting room. Two white men attacked him, injuring his face and kicking him in the ribs.
AP Photo
Lewis in 1966, after entertainers Sidney Poitier (far right) and Harry Belafonte (right) posted bail for him and other civil rights protesters in New York City
Only two weeks later, Lewis was one of 22 Freedom Riders—18 Black and four white activists—on another bus from Nashville to Montgomery. As they reached the Montgomery city limits, the state highway patrol cars that were escorting them turned away, but no Montgomery police appeared to replace them. When the bus arrived at the Greyhound terminal, several reporters approached Lewis to interview him. They were quickly overwhelmed by a mob of angry whites carrying baseball bats, bricks, chains, wooden boards, tire irons, and pipes, screaming, “Git them niggers.”
Two days later, the battered Lewis was back on another Freedom Ride bus, heading to Jackson, Mississippi. When they arrived at the terminal, a police officer pointed them toward the “colored” bathroom, but Lewis and the others headed toward the “white” men’s room and were promptly arrested. Lewis and others were later moved to the notorious Parchman Penitentiary state prison, where they were held for more than three weeks.
By the time he was elected chairman of SNCC in 1963, Lewis had been arrested 24 times. In that capacity, he was asked to help plan the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
THE MARCH IS most famous as the setting of Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” oration, but Lewis’s speech that day, representing the movement’s radical youth wing, provided a different kind of call to arms.
Under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph, the longtime civil rights and trade union leader, the march had brought together the major civil rights organizations, as well as labor unions and religious denominations and women’s groups. The planning group agreed that a representative of each group would address the huge crowd. Bayard Rustin, the veteran organizer who was in charge of the event’s logistics, required all speakers, even King, to hand in the texts of their speeches the night before. Lewis submitted a speech that attacked President John F. Kennedy for moving too cautiously on civil rights legislation. It included these lines:
“The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the street and put it into the courts. Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a ‘cooling-off’ period. We won’t stop now. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently.”
The evening before the march, Patrick O’Boyle, the archbishop of Washington who was scheduled to give the rally’s invocation, saw a copy of Lewis’s speech. A staunch Kennedy supporter, he alerted the White House and told Rustin that he would pull out of the event if Lewis was allowed to give those remarks.
The next day, as the marchers assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial, only a handful of the 250,000 people at the event knew about the drama taking place behind the stage. An intense argument, with raised voices and fingers shaking, broke out between Lewis and Roy Wilkins, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Rustin persuaded O’Boyle to start the program with his invocation, while an ad hoc committee battled with Lewis over the language of his speech. Finally, Randolph, the civil rights movement’s beloved elder statesman, appealed to Lewis. “I’ve waited all my life for this opportunity,” he said. “Please don’t ruin it, John. We’ve come this far together. Let us stay together.”
Lewis toned down the speech, but only slightly. His closing paragraphs no longer had the incendiary reference to Sherman’s march to the sea, but the address remained a powerful indictment of politicians’ failure to deal boldly with discrimination. He criticized Kennedy’s pending civil rights bill, filed two months earlier, for not going far enough in protecting Blacks from police brutality and economic exploitation, and for not including provisions to overturn Jim Crow laws that denied Blacks their right to vote.
“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient,” Lewis orated. “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. And then you holler, ‘Be patient!’ How long can we be patient? We want our freedom, and we want it now!”
“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient,” Lewis orated. “We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.”
Lewis removed his criticism of Kennedy, but he left in his attack on politicians in general. “By and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromise and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. There are exceptions, of course. We salute those.”
AFTER THE MARCH, Lewis worked with SNCC to register voters, participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign in 1964. After public outrage against Bloody Sunday helped secure passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Lewis went to work making sure that Black Americans took advantage of the new law. For the next seven years, Lewis directed the Voter Education Project, which registered and educated about four million Black voters.
President Jimmy Carter then appointed Lewis associate director of ACTION, the federal agency that oversaw domestic volunteer programs. In 1981, Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council. Five years later, he was elected to Congress from an Atlanta district (narrowly winning a primary over Julian Bond, another icon of the civil rights movement), and was re-elected every two years since.
Since his election, Lewis has walked a tightrope as both an activist and a legislator. He was an early opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In 2002, he sponsored the Peace Tax Fund bill, which would permit conscientious objection to taxation that funds the military. In 1988, he was one of 64 people arrested at the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., for protesting apartheid. In 2009, he joined several other representatives who were arrested outside the embassy of Sudan to draw attention to the genocide in Darfur. He was a strong ally of students involved in the immigrant rights movement and a key supporter of the DREAM Act. At a 2011 rally, Lewis said, “We all live in the same house. If any one of us is illegal, then we all are illegal. There is no illegal human being.” In 2013, he was arrested on the National Mall at a protest rally demanding that Congress support a comprehensive immigration bill.
In June 2016, Lewis launched a sit-in on the House floor to protest his Republican colleagues’ failure to allow debate on a gun control bill. His action eventually drew 170 other House Democrats and infuriated Republicans. After the sit-in ended, he told supporters on the Capitol steps, “The fight is not over. We’re going to continue to push, to pull, to stand up, and if necessary, to sit down. So don’t give up, don’t give in. Keep the faith, and keep your eyes on the prize.”
Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
John Lewis addressing marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 1, 2020
For the past few years, Lewis’s admirers have called for renaming that Selma bridge—named for a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader—to honor the civil rights hero. His death should accelerate that movement to celebrate his life and legacy.
In 1989, Lewis returned to Montgomery to help dedicate a civil rights memorial. An elderly white man came up to him and said, “I remember you from the Freedom Rides.” Lewis took a moment to recall the man’s face. It was Floyd Mann, who had been Alabama’s safety commissioner in the early 1960s.
Though a committed segregationist, Mann had been assured by Montgomery’s police chief that when the Freedom Rides came to his city no violence would occur. Seeing the white mob attack the Freedom Riders as they got off the bus, Mann realized he had been double-crossed. He charged into the bus station, fired his gun into the air and yelled, “There’ll be no killing here today.” A white attacker raised his bat for a final blow. Mann put his gun to the man’s head. “One more swing,” he said, “and you’re dead.”
When they met again, Lewis whispered to Floyd Mann, “You saved my life.” The two men hugged, and Lewis began to cry. As they parted, Mann said, “I’m right proud of your career.”
