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John R. Lewis, front-line civil rights leader and eminence of Capitol Hill, dies at 80
Laurence I. Barrett (07/18/20)
John R. Lewis, a civil rights leader who preached nonviolence while enduring beatings and jailings during seminal front-line confrontations of the 1960s and later spent more than three decades in Congress defending the crucial gains he had helped achieve for people of color, has died. He was 80.
His death was announced in statements from his family and from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Advisers to senior Democratic leaders confirmed that he died July 17, but other details were not immediately available.
Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, announced his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer on Dec. 29 and said he planned to continue working amid treatment. “I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said in a statement. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
His last public appearance came at Black Lives Matter Plaza with D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) on a Sunday morning in June, two days after taping a virtual town hall online with former president Barack Obama.
While Mr. Lewis was not a policy maven as a lawmaker, he served the role of conscience of the Democratic caucus on many matters. His reputation as keeper of the 1960s flame defined his career in Congress.
When President George H.W. Bush vetoed a bill easing requirements to bring employment discrimination suits in 1990, Mr. Lewis rallied support for its revival. It became law as the Civil Rights Act of 1991. It took a dozen years, but in 2003 he won authorization for construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the Mall.
In 2012, when Rep. Paul C. Broun (R.-Ga.) proposed eliminating funding for one aspect of the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Lewis denounced the move as “shameful.” The amendment died.
Mr. Lewis’s final years in the House were marked by personal conflict with President Trump. Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Mr. Lewis said, rendered Trump’s victory “illegitimate.” He boycotted Trump’s inauguration. Later, during the House’s formal debate on whether to proceed with the impeachment process, Mr. Lewis had evinced no doubts: “For some, this vote might be hard,” he said on the House floor in December 2019. “But we have a mandate and a mission to be on the right side of history.”
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| John Lewis at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 2013. |
Born to impoverished Alabama sharecroppers, Mr. Lewis was a high school student in 1955 when he heard broadcasts by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that drew him to activism.
“Every minister I’d ever heard talked about ‘over yonder,’ where we’d put on white robes and golden slippers and sit with the angels,” he recalled in his 1998 memoir, “Walking With the Wind.” “But this man was talking about dealing with the problems people were facing in their lives right now, specifically black lives in the South.”
Mr. Lewis vaulted from obscurity in 1963 to head the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he helped form three years earlier. SNCC, pronounced “snick,” had quickly become a kind of advance guard of the movement, helping organize sit-ins and demonstrations throughout the South.
Within weeks of taking over SNCC, Mr. Lewis was in the Oval Office with five nationally known black leaders, including King, Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins.
Labeled the “Big Six” by the press, they rejected President John F. Kennedy’s request to cancel the March on Washington planned for that August that promised to lure hundreds of thousands of protesters to the doorstep of the White House to push for strong civil rights legislation. The president argued that the march would inflame tensions with powerful Southern politicians and set back the cause of civil rights.
From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his aspirational “I Have a Dream” speech. Mr. Lewis, at 23 the youngest speaker, gave a prescient warning: “If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. . . . We must say, ‘Wake up, America, wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not be patient.”
The toughest of the major addresses, Mr. Lewis’s text had in fact been toned down earlier that day at the behest of his seniors — including King, his mentor. They feared that explicit condemnation of the Kennedy administration’s timidity and the threat of a “scorched earth” approach would create a political backlash. (With the death of Mr. Lewis, all of the speakers from the March are now deceased.)
The contrast with his elders symbolized Mr. Lewis’s unusual role in those tumultuous years. At critical moments, he rebuffed their advice to give legislation or litigation more time. Handcuffs and truncheons never dulled his belief in confrontation. Yet he stoutly opposed the militant black nationalists such as Stokely Carmichael who would later take over SNCC.
As the last survivor of the “Big Six,” Mr. Lewis was the one who kept striving for black-white amity. Time magazine included him in a 1975 list of “living saints” headed by Mother Teresa. With only mild hyperbole, the New Republic in 1996 called him “the last integrationist.”
Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the civil rights movement who had known Mr. Lewis since the mid-60s, said in an interview, “His most distinguishing mark was steadfastness. He showed lifelong fidelity to the idea of one man, one vote — democracy as the defining purpose of the United States.
“John Lewis saw racism as a stubborn gate in freedom’s way, but if you take seriously the democratic purpose, whites as well as blacks benefit,” Branch added. “And he became a rather lonely guardian of nonviolence.”
On Inauguration Day 2009, Obama, the country’s first black president, gave Mr. Lewis a photo with the inscription: “Because of you, John.” It joined a memorabilia collection that included the pen President Lyndon B. Johnson handed him after signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Ironically, Mr. Lewis had backed the front-runner, Hillary Clinton, in the nominating contest’s early days because of a personal bond with both Clintons. But he switched allegiance once Obama gained some traction.
Bloody Sunday
Passage of the Voting Rights Act, which provided incisors for the 15th Amendment 95 years after its enactment, is the Lewis saga’s richest chapter, what he called “the highlight of my involvement in the movement.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act was beneficial in terms of public accommodations and employment, but its voting provision was ineffective.
Civil rights workers were attacked frequently, occasionally fatally. Torching and dynamiting of black churches were rising. Perpetrators, though often known, went unpunished. Local registrars continued to bar blacks. Only if black citizens could vote in large numbers, civil rights leaders believed, would Deep South officials enforce laws.
But Johnson told King in December 1964 that Congress, dominated by old-line Southern lawmakers, would reject new legislation.
Both SNCC and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided to step up organizing in Selma, Ala. Black residents there constituted half the population, but only 1 percent could vote.
Weeks of demonstrations produced only confrontations with police. During one set-to, an officer shot an unarmed local resident. In the aftermath, an SCLC staffer proposed a large protest march, from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery.
King was in Atlanta, where his senior advisers persuaded him to stay. The SNCC executive committee, increasingly resentful of SCLC’s dominance, voted to avoid the event. But SNCC Chairman Lewis would not allow himself to abstain. That decision, he said later, “would change the course of my life.”
March 7, 1965, became known as Bloody Sunday. With the SCLC’s Hosea Williams, Mr. Lewis led 600 people to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Selma’s outskirts. There, police and mounted “posse men” — deputized civilians — blocked them.
Ordered to disperse, the procession held its ground. The troopers charged. Network cameras filmed police in gas masks brutalizing unarmed men, women and children, many dressed for church. Millions that night saw police using clubs and tear gas chasing terrified civilians. Mr. Lewis, his skull fractured, went to the hospital along with 77 others.
“I remember how vivid the sounds were as the troopers rushed toward us,” he wrote in his memoir, co-authored with Michael D’Orso. “The clunk of the troopers’ heavy boots, the whoops of rebel yells from the white onlookers, the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs hitting the hard asphalt, the voice of a woman shouting, ‘Get ’em!’ ”
Bloody Sunday pricked the national psyche deeply. When King called for reinforcements for a second march to take place on March 9, which he would lead, hundreds of volunteers, white and black, hurried to Selma. A white minister was beaten and killed by segregationists.
Meanwhile, Johnson had an epiphany. Widespread revulsion was so keen that strong voting rights legislation would be politically feasible after all. The president announced the details to a joint session of Congress on March 15, equating Selma’s significance with that of Lexington, Concord and Appomattox.
When Johnson signed the bill Aug. 6, Mr. Lewis viewed it as “the end of a very long road.” It was also the beginning of the process that extended the franchise to Southern blacks, including Mr. Lewis’s mother, who had opposed her son’s activism.
The bigger revolt
John Robert Lewis was born Feb. 21, 1940, near Troy, Ala., the third of 10 children of Eddie Lewis and the former Willie Mae Carter. Tenant farmers for generations, they saved enough money to buy their own 100 acres in 1944.
John — called Preacher because he sermonized chickens — was the odd child out. He loved books and hated guns. He never hunted small game with other kids. His petition for access to the Pike County library went unanswered.
“White kids went to high school, Negroes to training school,” Mr. Lewis told the New York Times in 1967. “You weren’t supposed to aspire. We couldn’t take books from the public library. And I remember when the county paved rural roads, they went 15 miles out of their way to avoid blacktopping our Negro farm roads.”
College seemed impossible until the family learned of the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. Aspiring black preachers willing to take campus jobs could attend free.
He arrived determined to perfect his “whooping” — preaching at a high emotional pitch — but he soon found the pull of social activism irresistible. With other Nashville students, he came under the influence of a Vanderbilt graduate student, James Lawson, who had been imprisoned for refusing military service during the Korean War.
Years later, Mr. Lewis successfully applied for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam conflict and broke with Johnson over the war issue earlier than the other “Big Six” leaders.
In ad hoc workshops, Lawson taught “New Testament pacifism” (how to love rather than strike the enemy tormenting you) and Gandhi-style civil disobedience (staying calm when punched in the head).
These lessons mattered in 1960 as the Nashville Student Movement conducted sit-ins aimed at forcing retailers to allow black customers to use the stores’ eateries. Mr. Lewis experienced his first arrest when police collared the quiet young demonstrators, not the roughnecks who had been knocking them off stools.
As the Nashville campaign broadened to include other targets, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s legal lion, delivered a lecture at Fisk University in Nashville, advising restraint. Don’t go to jail, he suggested. Let the NAACP go to court.
Mr. Lewis was appalled. Marshall’s admonitions, he said, “convinced me more than ever that our revolt was as much against this nation’s traditional black leadership structure as it was against racial segregation and discrimination.” The students ultimately prevailed in Nashville.
King wanted to blend the Nashville activists and counterparts elsewhere into an SCLC youth auxiliary. But Lawson argued that SCLC was too cautious. Discussions on the issue led to SNCC’s creation in 1960. Mr. Lewis was an enthusiastic recruit.
Even before Mr. Lewis graduated in 1961 with his preacher’s certificate, he no longer aspired to the ministry. With other SNCC members from Nashville, he volunteered to join an older group, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), in riding inter-state buses throughout the South. The Supreme Court had already ruled that depots could not be segregated, but that decision was being ignored.
The “Freedom Rides” aroused fierce resistance. Arsonists torched buses in Anniston, Ala., and Birmingham. In several cities, police either looked the other way while crowds beat the riders or arrested the so-called “outside agitators.” Violence became so serious that CORE withdrew.
The SNCC contingent refused to quit. Mr. Lewis, who absorbed his share of bruises and arrests, wound up spending 22 days in Parchman Farm, a Mississippi penitentiary infamous for primitive conditions. But the Freedom Rides drew national attention to the desegregation campaign and attracted recruits. And the Kennedy administration began formal implementation of the Supreme Court decision.
SNCC gained prominence and confidence in its strategy. “We now meant to push,” Mr. Lewis recalled. “We meant to provoke.”
But the group suffered growing pains, including unstable leadership. In June 1963, SNCC’s third chairman resigned suddenly. Mr. Lewis came to Atlanta for an emergency meeting. It ended with his election as chairman.
Chronically broke, SNCC paid its chairman $10 a week plus rent for a dingy apartment. Mr. Lewis would hold the post for three years — longer than anyone else — but tensions scarred his experience. Continued attacks on blacks in the South, growing unrest in northern ghettos and the fact that mainstream leaders declined to break with Lyndon Johnson combined to strengthen SNCC’s separatist element.
Carmichael, that faction’s charismatic leader, preached black nationalism and criticized Mr. Lewis as too measured and accommodating, a “little Martin Luther King.” In 1966, Carmichael (who later renamed himself Kwame Ture) was chosen chairman. SNCC’s white members were shunted aside and urged to leave. Even 30 years later, Mr. Lewis would say of his ouster: “It hurt me more than anything I’ve ever been through.”
Mr. Lewis eventually returned to Atlanta to join the Southern Regional Council, which sponsored community development. In 1968, he joined Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, as a liaison to minorities. He was with the entourage in Los Angeles when Kennedy was assassinated.
Although the murder devastated him, campaigning had sharpened Mr. Lewis’s interest in seeking public office. So did his marriage, later that year, to Lillian Miles, a librarian by profession but a political junkie by avocation. She was one of his principal advisers until her death in 2012.
Survivors include a son, John-Miles Lewis.
'Off-the-charts liberal'
Mr. Lewis was serving as executive director of the Southern Regional Council’s Atlanta-based Voter Education Project, which helped register millions of blacks, when he ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. House seat in 1977. The position had been vacated when Rep. Andrew Young was tapped by President Jimmy Carter to become ambassador to the United Nations.
Carter subsequently named Mr. Lewis associate director of ACTION, then the umbrella agency of the Peace Corps, VISTA and smaller antipoverty programs. Mr. Lewis headed the domestic division.
His enthusiasm for the assignment cooled when he concluded that the White House was indifferent to VISTA’s mission. He also refused to take sides when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) challenged Carter’s renomination in 1980. His neutrality irked both camps.
Mr. Lewis resigned in 1979, returning to Atlanta determined to enter politics. He won a city council seat in 1981, part of that body’s first black majority. His initial gambit — to tighten the council’s ethics code — evoked angry resistance.
He cemented his contrarian image by opposing a major road project, arguing that it would disrupt residential neighborhoods and worsen pollution. The road’s backers, including a group of black clergy, gave the controversy a racial tinge. Opposition to the program, the ministers’ leaflet said, was “a vote against the [black] mayor and the black community.”
It was a familiar situation. “Once again,” Mr. Lewis observed in his memoir, “I was accused of not being black enough.” The project, reduced in scale, was approved. The cost for Mr. Lewis: outsider status throughout his five years on the council.
In 1986, when Mr. Lewis again sought the 5th Congressional District Democratic nomination, his opponent was State Sen. Julian Bond, once SNCC’s publicist. Bond was considered the prohibitive favorite.
Tall, handsome and charismatic, Bond was a celebrity. “Saturday Night Live” had him as a guest host. Cosmopolitan magazine anointed him one of America’s 10 sexiest men. He was a lecture circuit star. Profiles described Mr. Lewis as squat, scowling, wooden, humorless.
Atlanta’s black establishment flocked to Bond. So did prominent outsiders, including then-Washington Mayor Marion Barry, comedian Bill Cosby, actress Cicely Tyson and Edward Kennedy.
Mr. Lewis campaigned tirelessly, urging that citizens “vote for the tugboat, not the showboat.” He won by four percentage points because whites — particularly Jews — gave him overwhelming support. The acrid campaign corroded his once-strong friendship with Bond.
When Mr. Lewis arrived on Capitol Hill, the New York Times observed wryly that he was one of the few members “who must deal with the sainthood issue.”
Mr. Lewis was a nominal member of the Democratic leadership as senior chief deputy whip, but he was rarely involved in nose counting or legislative detail. Former representative Alan Wheat (D-Mo.), a colleague in the Congressional Black Caucus, said in an interview, “John’s biggest strength in the House was to motivate people, to gather impetus for key measures. He used his standing as a cultural icon for good causes, never for personal benefit.”
On both social and economic issues, Mr. Lewis lived up to the label he put on himself: “off-the-charts liberal.” Like other members of the Black Caucus, he consistently opposed domestic spending cuts. But he was just as vehement in his opposition to the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, although many blacks — particularly Georgians — disagreed.
Unlike some other black notables, Mr. Lewis refused to participate in Louis Farrakhan’s 1995 Million Man March in Washington. He also denounced Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic rants. When needled about racial loyalty, Mr. Lewis liked to say, “I follow my conscience, not my complexion.”
In 2010, Obama awarded Mr. Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He continued to say that his conscience demanded that he teach young people the legacy of the civil rights movement. In 2013, he began a trilogy in comic book form called “March.” When a former supporter of the Ku Klux Klan named Elwin Wilson popped out of history in 2009, asking forgiveness for having severely beaten then-Freedom Rider Lewis in 1961 at a Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, S.C., Mr. Lewis took him on three TV shows to show that “love is stronger than hate.”
He revisited the Edmund Pettus Bridge on anniversaries of Bloody Sunday, often accompanied by political leaders of both parties. “Barack Obama,” he mused, “is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”
=======================Trump tweets he's 'saddened' by John Lewis' death, world leaders pay tribute
ABC News (07/18/20)
Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis died at the age of 80 Friday.
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| In this file photo taken on February 14, 2011 U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) (R) is presented with the 2010 Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama during an East Room event at the White House February 15, 2011 in Washington, DC. |
President Trump on Saturday, issued a proclamation at 11:11 a.m. to lower the flags at the White House and all federal buildings and grounds in recognition of Representative Lewis.
Just a little after 2 p.m. ET, the president tweeted that he was "saddened" to hear of Lewis' passing.
Vice President Mike Pence released a statement on the passed of Rep. John Lewis calling him a "great man whose courage and decades of public service changed America forever, and he will be greatly missed.
He called Lewis a friend who "Even when we differed, John was always unfailingly kind and my family and I will never forget the privilege of crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge at his side on the 45th anniversary of Bloody Sunday."
"Karen and I and send our prayers and deepest sympathies to his family and friends and all who mourn the passing of this good and great man. May God bless the memory of John Lewis and may his example ever inspire," Pence's statement concluded.
"Rep. John Lewis was an icon of the civil rights movement, and he leaves an enduring legacy that will never be forgotten. We hold his family in our prayers, as we remember Rep. John Lewis’ incredible contributions to our country," White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in a tweet.
Lewis died seven months after a routine medical visit revealed that he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Black Caucus confirmed the news of his death.
He represented Georgia's 5th Congressional District since 1987.
Here's a look at how politicians, celebrities and world leaders are mourning Lewis' death:
Former Vice President Joe Biden
"We are made in the image of God, and then there is John Lewis.
How could someone in flesh and blood be so courageous, so full of hope and love in the face of so much hate, violence, and vengeance? Perhaps it was the Spirit that found John as a young boy in the Deep South dreaming of preaching the social gospel; the work ethic his sharecropper parents instilled in him and that stayed with him; the convictions of nonviolent civil disobedience he mastered from Dr. King and countless fearless leaders in the movement; or the abiding connection with the constituents of Georgia’s 5th District he loyally served for decades.
Or perhaps it was that he was truly a one-of-a-kind, a moral compass who always knew where to point us and which direction to march.
It is rare to meet and befriend our heroes. John was that hero for so many people of every race and station, including us. He absorbed the force of human nature’s cruelty during the course of his life, and the only thing that could finally stop him was cancer. But he was not bitter. We spoke to him a few days ago for the final time. His voice still commanded respect and his laugh was still full of joy. Instead of answering our concerns for him, he asked about us. He asked us to stay focused on the work left undone to heal this nation. He was himself – a man at peace, of dignity, grace and character.
John’s life reminds us that the most powerful symbol of what it means to be an American is what we do with the time we have to make real the promise of our nation – that we are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally. Through the beatings, the marches, the arrests, the debates on war, peace, and freedom, and the legislative fights for good jobs and health care and the fundamental right to vote, he taught us that while the journey toward equality is not easy, we must be unafraid and never cower and never, ever give up.
That is the charge a great American and humble man of God has left us. For parents trying to answer their children’s questions about what to make of the world we are in today, teach them about John Lewis. For the peaceful marchers for racial and economic justice around the world who are asking where we go from here, follow his lead. For his fellow legislators, govern by your conscience like he did, not for power or party. He was our bridge – to our history so we did not forget its pain and to our future so we never lose our hope.
To John’s son, John Miles, and to his family, friends, staff, and constituents, we send you our love and prayers. Thank you for sharing him with the nation and the world.
And to John, march on, dear friend. May God bless you. May you reunite with your beloved Lillian. And may you continue to inspire righteous good trouble down from the Heavens," was the full statement made by Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden.
Former President Barack Obama
"America is a constant work in progress. What gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further — to speak out for what’s right, to challenge an unjust status quo, and to imagine a better world. John Lewis — one of the original Freedom Riders, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington, leader of the march from Selma to Montgomery, Member of Congress representing the people of Georgia for 33 years — not only assumed that responsibility, he made it his life’s work," Obama, who awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, said in a statement.
"In so many ways, John’s life was exceptional. But he never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country might do. He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, a longing to do what’s right, a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect," Obama's statement continued. "And it’s because he saw the best in all of us that he will continue, even in his passing, to serve as a beacon in that long journey towards a more perfect union."
Former President George W. Bush
"Laura and I join our fellow Americans in mourning the loss of Congressman John Lewis. As a young man marching for equality in Selma, Alabama, John answered brutal violence with courageous hope. And throughout his career as a civil rights leader and public servant, he worked to make our country a more perfect union. America can best honor John's memory by continuing his journey toward liberty and justice for all," Bush said in a statement.
Former President Bill Clinton
"John Lewis gave all he had to redeem America’s unmet promise of equality and justice for all, and to create a place for us to build a more perfect union together. In so doing he became the conscience of the nation," Clinton tweeted.
Former President Jimmy Carter
"Rosalynn and I are saddened by the death of Congressman John Lewis. He made an indelible mark on history through his quest to make our nation more just. John never shied away from what he called “good trouble” to lead our nation on the path toward human and civil rights. Everything he did, he did in a spirit of love. All Americans, regardless of race or religion, owe John Lewis a debt of gratitude. We send our condolences and prayers to his family and friends," the former president said via a statement issued from the Carter Center.
Congressional Black Caucus
"The world has lost a legend; the civil rights movement has lost an icon, the City of Atlanta has lost one of its most fearless leaders, and the Congressional Black Caucus has lost our longest serving member. The Congressional Black Caucus is known as the Conscience of the Congress," the organization said in a statement. "John Lewis was known as the conscience of our caucus. A fighter for justice until the end, Mr. Lewis recently visited Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington DC. His mere presence encouraged a new generation of activists to “speak up and speak out” and get into “good trouble” to continue bending the arc toward justice and freedom."
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a longtime colleague of Lewis, said the civil rights icon was "one of the greatest heroes of American history."
"John Lewis was a titan of the civil rights movement whose goodness, faith and bravery transformed our nation – from the determination with which he met discrimination at lunch counters and on Freedom Rides, to the courage he showed as a young man facing down violence and death on Edmund Pettus Bridge, to the moral leadership he brought to the Congress for more than 30 years," Pelosi said in a statement Friday night.
"Every day of John Lewis’s life was dedicated to bringing freedom and justice to all. As he declared 57 years ago during the March on Washington, standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial: ‘Our minds, souls, and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all the people.’ How fitting it is that even in the last weeks of his battle with cancer, John summoned the strength to visit the peaceful protests where the newest generation of Americans had poured into the streets to take up the unfinished work of racial justice," her statement continued.
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| In this Oct. 24, 2019 file photo, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., prepares to pay his respects to Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., who lies in state during a memorial service at the U.S. Capitol Hill in Washington. |
Sen. Elizabeth Warren
"John Lewis was a true American hero and the moral compass of our nation. May his courage and conviction live on in all of us as we continue to make good trouble for justice and opportunity.
Rest in power, John," Warren said in a statement.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
"From marching in Selma to serving in the House, Representative John Lewis spent his life fighting for civil rights for every single American," Schumer tweeted. "He is an American hero and a giant. And we are all better for the "good trouble" he made. Rest in peace, John."
Martin Luther King III
"John Lewis was an American treasure. He gave a voice to the voiceless, and he reminded each of us that the most powerful nonviolent tool is the vote," King, whose father was a close friend to Lewis, said in a statement Friday. "Our hearts feel empty without our friend, but we find comfort knowing that he is free at last."
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| In this Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007, file photo, with the Capitol Dome in the background, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., is seen on Capitol Hill in Washington. Lewis died Friday, July 17, 2020. |
Apple CEO Tim Cook
"We have lost an American hero. John Lewis guided us toward a more righteous world. He marched in Selma, he marched on Washington—he marched for us all. His life's work shaped our history and his legacy inspires us to continue the march for racial equity and justice," the Apple CEO tweeted.
Philanthropist Bill Gates
"This is a great loss for America, and for everyone who believes in making the world a more just place. John Lewis not only saw that our country could be better--he never stopped working to make it that way. We need leaders like him more than ever," Gates said in a statement Friday.
Former Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
"From a small farm in Alabama, to life-risking service in the civil rights movement, to three decades in Congress, he was always 'walking with the wind,' steered by a moral compass that told him when to make good trouble and when to heal troubled waters. Always true to his word, his faith and his principles, John Lewis became the conscience of the nation," Hillary Clinton said in a joint statement with former President Bill Clinton.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
"I will never forget joining hands with John as members of Congress sang We Shall Overcome at a 2008 ceremony honoring his friend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It could not have been more humbling to consider what he had suffered and sacrificed so those words could be sung in that place," McConnell said in a statement Friday night. "Dr. King famously said 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' But progress is not automatic. Our great nation’s history has only bent towards justice because great men like John Lewis took it upon themselves to help bend it. Our nation will never forget this American hero."
Sen. Kamala Harris
"It was an honor to once again join Congressman Lewis this year in Selma, Alabama in March for what would be his final walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where just 55 years ago, Lewis was among those beaten by state troopers as they bravely marched from Selma to Montgomery for the right to vote. I was moved by his words: ‘On this bridge, some of us gave a little blood to help redeem the soul of America. Our country is a better country. We are a better people, but we have still a distance to travel to go before we get there,'" the California senator said in a statement Friday.
“We are grateful that John Lewis never lost sight of how great our country can be. He carried the baton of progress and justice to the very end. It now falls on us to pick it up and march on. We must never give up, never give in, and keep the faith," she said.
NAACP
"We are deeply saddened by the passing of John Lewis. His life-long mission for justice, equality and freedom left a permanent impression on our nation and world. The NAACP extends our sincerest condolences to his family, and we send prayers of comfort and strength to all," the organization said in a statement.
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White House praises John Lewis' legacy as Trump stays silent and visits club
Lauren Egan, NBC News (07/18/20)
WASHINGTON — As lawmakers from both parties offered their condolences and reflected on the life and legacy of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who died Friday night, the White House stayed silent, waiting until Saturday morning to acknowledge the death of the civil rights icon.
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President Donald Trump arrived at his Virginia golf course around 9:15 a.m. E.T., just minutes before McEnany tweeted about Lewis. Trump, who shared dozens of tweets and retweets about his Democratic opponents Friday night, has not personally acknowledge Lewis' death.
Flags at the White House were also lowered to half-staff shortly before McEnany's tweet, although the White House has not officially announced they were lowered in honor of Lewis' death.
Lewis viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. He boycotted Trump's 2017 inauguration after telling NBC News that he did not view Trump as a "legitimate president" due to evidence of Russia's meddling in the 2016 election.
Trump was criticized for tweeting racist insults in response to Lewis' comments, writing at the time that the Georgia lawmaker "should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk - no action or results. Sad!"
Some encouraged Trump to "please say nothing" about Lewis' death.
"Please don’t comment on the life of Congressman Lewis. Your press secretary released a statement, leave it at that," Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Lewis was a member, tweeted Saturday. "Please let us mourn in peace."
Other Republican lawmakers, many of whom did not always see eye to eye with Lewis, honored the congressman Friday night as news of his death broke.
"Laura and I join our fellow Americans in mourning the loss of Congressman John Lewis," President George W. Bush said in a statement Friday. "America can best honor John's memory by continuing his journey toward liberty and justice for all."
Lewis also skipped Bush's inauguration in 2001 in protest of the controversial election results in Florida that resulted in Bush's victory.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also shared a statement late Friday night calling Lewis an "American hero."
“You did not need to agree with John on many policy details to be awed by his life, admire his dedication to his neighbors in Georgia’s Fifth District, or appreciate his generous, respectful, and friendly bearing," McConnell said. “Our great nation’s history has only bent towards justice because great men like John Lewis took it upon themselves to help bend it."
Lewis, a sharecroppers' son who became a giant of the civil rights movement, died Friday after a monthslong battle with cancer, his family said. He was 80.
The longtime Georgia congressman, an advocate of nonviolent protest who had his skull fractured by Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, was the last surviving speaker from 1963's March on Washington.
=======================John Lewis and C.T. Vivian belonged to a long tradition of religious leaders in the civil rights struggle
Lawrence Burnley, Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, University of Dayton, The Conversation (07/18/20)
With the deaths of Rep. John Lewis and the Rev. Cordy Tindell “C.T.” Vivian, the U.S. has lost two civil rights greats who drew upon their faith as they pushed for equality for Black Americans.
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| John Lewis linked arms with religious leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, while marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. |
That both men were people of the cloth is no coincidence.
From the earliest times in U.S. history, religious leaders have led the struggle for liberation and racial justice for Black Americans. As an ordained minister and a historian, I see a common thread running from Black resistance in the earliest periods of slavery in the antebellum South, through the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – in which Lewis and Vivian played important roles – and up to today’s Black Lives Matter movement.
As Patrisse Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, says: “The fight to save your life is a spiritual fight.”
Spiritual calling
Vivian studied theology alongside Lewis at the American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee.
For both men, activism was an extension of their faith. Speaking to PBS in 2004, Lewis explained: “In my estimation, the civil rights movement was a religious phenomenon. When we’d go out to sit in or go out to march, I felt, and I really believe, there was a force in front of us and a force behind us, ’cause sometimes you didn’t know what to do. You didn’t know what to say, you didn’t know how you were going to make it through the day or through the night. But somehow and some way, you believed – you had faith – that it all was going to be all right.”
Fellow civil rights activists knew Vivian as the “resident theologian” in King’s inner circle due to “how profound he is in both his political and biblical exegesis,” fellow campaigner Rev. Jesse Jackson recalled.
Rejecting ‘other world’ theology
Faith traditions inform the civil rights and social justice work of many Black religious leaders. They interpret religious teachings through the prism of the injustice in the here and now.
Speaking of King’s influence, Lewis explained: “He was not concerned about the streets of heaven and the pearly gates and the streets paved with milk and honey. He was more concerned about the streets of Montgomery and the way that Black people and poor people were being treated in Montgomery.”
This focus on real-world struggles as part of the role of spiritual leaders was present in the earliest Black civil rights and anti-slavery leaders. Nat Turner, a leader in the revolt against slavery, for example, saw rebellion as the work of God, and drew upon biblical texts to inspire his actions. Likewise fellow anti-slavery campaigners Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee rejected the “otherworld” theology taught to enslaved Africans by their white captors, which sought to deflect attention away from their condition in “this world” with promises of a better afterlife.
Incorporating religion into the Black anti-slavery movement sowed the seeds for faith being central to the struggle for racial justice. As the church historian James Washington observed in 1986, the “very disorientation of their slavery and the persistent impact of systemic racism and other forms of oppression provided the opportunity – indeed the necessity – of a new religious synthesis.”
‘Ubuntuism’
The synthesis continued into the 20th century. Religious civil rights leaders like Lewis and Vivian, clearly felt compelled to make the struggle for justice a central part of a spiritual leader’s role.
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| C.T. Vivian leading prayer on the courthouse steps in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. |
In 1965, Vivian was punched in the mouth by Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark in an incident caught on camera and carried on national news. Vivian later said: “Everything I am as a minister, as an African American, as a civil rights activist and a struggler for justice for everyone came together in that moment.”
Though their activism was grounded in Christianity, Lewis or Vivian both forged strategic and powerful coalitions with those outside of their faith. In some ways, they transcended theologically informed ideologies with a world view more akin to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s interpretation of “Ubuntu” – that one’s own humanity is inextricably bound up with that of others.
Lewis and Vivian personified this value in their leadership styles.
George Floyd
Racial justice remains integral to Black Christian leadership in the 21st century.
After the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, it was the Rev. Al Sharpton whose words were carried across the globe, calling on white America to “get your knee off our necks” at Floyd’s memorial service.
In recent years, the Rev. William J. Barber II has been such a vocal and powerful presence in protests that some Americans consider him to be a the successor to past civil rights greats.
In an interview in early 2020, Barber said: “There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world.”
John Lewis and Rev. C.T. Vivian lived those words.
Some of this information appeared in a previous article published on June 17
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Lawrence Burnley works for and owns shares in an organisation. He is affiliated with an organization. I work for the University of Dayton and a principal for Inclusive Engagements, LLC.
=======================John Lewis Was an American Founder
Adam Serwer, The Atlantic (07/18/20)
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“We had to do it. Unfortunately, I say it was a necessity. We could not help ourselves,” Alabama Governor William C. Oates confessed. In 1901, the Montgomery Advertiser announced that with the new state constitution, “the putrid sore of negro suffrage is severed from the body of the commonwealth.” Such wholesale purges of Black Americans from the polity unfolded throughout the South, where the Democratic Party established a system of implacable white supremacy.
Most of America’s Black population, when Lewis was born, lived in a white republic, where they were driven into poverty, disenfranchised, and denied basic civil and political rights through violence, custom, and law. More than one-third of Alabama’s population when Lewis was born was denied the right to vote.
“As a child, I was restless to escape the boundaries that had been set for me,” Lewis wrote in his 2012 memoir Across That Bridge. “As a disenfranchised citizen who yearned for change, as a child born on the dark side of the American dream, I heard the whispers of the spirit calling me to wrestle with the soul of a nation.” Lewis wanted to be a preacher; as the historian David Halberstam wrote in his book The Children, as a kid Lewis would practice by preaching to chickens. “Lewis did chicken births, chicken weddings, chicken baptisms, and chicken funerals; they were in the truest sense his flock.”
In pursuit of that ambition, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1957, where he met C. T. Vivian, James Lawson, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry. Together, they pioneered the nonviolent tactics of a movement that would change the country, and the world. Vivian, Halbertsam wrote, “said that it was as if God had a master plan, bringing so many uncommon people of such rare strength and vision together in one place at one time.” Yesterday, Vivian and Lewis passed into eternity, and with them, the priceless memories and earned wisdom of a lifetime of struggles for justice.
Vivian, a reverend, journalist, and agitator, was a northerner. Raised in Illinois, he chafed at the southern mores that Lewis had grown up with—once, in 1956, shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott, Halbertsam recounts, Vivian refused to sit in the segregated section of a Nashville bus. The driver emptied the bus and drove Vivian to the police station, where the cops acknowledged that sitting in the white section of the bus was no longer an arrestable offense. He was also already an old hand at sit-ins by the time he met Lewis in Nashville, having participated in one at a segregated lunch counter in Illinois in 1947.
In 1959, Lewis, Vivian, and the others began quietly testing sit-in tactics, entering segregated facilities and asking why they were being denied service, but stopping short of refusing to leave. In 1960, days after a group of black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged their famed protest at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, the Nashville movement began in earnest, with demonstrations at downtown restaurants and department stores. Violence, mass arrests, and a bombing failed to halt the movement—the more repressive the response, the more people joined the cause. Two months later, Nashville began desegregating its public facilities, the first major city in the South to do so.
Vivian would later explain why they chose such targets. “There is no greater indignity beyond the buses themselves, you see, where you had to go to the back and people would drive away without you, take your money, or you could be arrested … But the next thing was the matter of the lunch counters, because you couldn’t eat downtown. Your wife, your children, you … You were always watching other people be able to appreciate the natural consequences of a democratic society and you were not able to participate.”
These efforts to desegregate facilities and businesses were rarely popular. Many white Americans resented the disruption to the status quo, even if on some level, they told themselves, they sympathized with the protesters. Activists such as Lewis and Vivian were a constant exasperation to American political leadership, who wished to placate them without radically altering the structure of American society. But for the leaders of the movement, that would not do.
“As we participated in protest after protest, sit-in after sit-in, where crowds of uncontrollable angry people swarmed around us yelling and jeering, where we were beaten with billy clubs, lead pipes, trampled by horses, and attacked by dogs, our faith was not dampened, as many people today, looking back on the history, often wonder. It actually grew in power and strength,” Lewis wrote in 2012. “Public support for our work did not decrease because of mob violence and police brutality, it increased. It almost seemed the more the unjust resisted, the more impassioned the call for change.”
This was only the beginning. Vivian and Lewis fought and bled for the cause at sit-ins, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, when police and the Ku Klux Klan worked hand in hand to brutalize protesters trying to desegregate public buses, through the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in 1965, where Lewis had his skull cracked open by Alabama state troopers. Without these men and their allies in the civil-rights movement, the maxim in the Declaration of Independence that all are created equal would be but words on paper written by slave masters. Absent their sacrifice, their bravery, and their brilliance, America would remain a herrenvolk republic, not a nation for all its citizens.
By custom, headline writers refer to men such as Vivian and Lewis as “civil-rights icons.” This understates who they were. They were the leaders of an incomplete revolution that remade American society. If Americans loosely followed the example of the French, one could argue that the First American Republic, founded by men including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, would have lasted from 1776 to 1861, when the Confederacy turned its guns on Fort Sumter. The Second American Republic, which abolished slavery and wrote the equality of man into the Constitution, was founded by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Frederick Douglass. The Third American Republic, the only one to sincerely pursue the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the first true attempt at interracial democracy in American history, was founded by people including Vivian, Lewis, Diane Nash, and Coretta Scott King. They are part of a third generation of American leaders who elevated the universal truths in Christian doctrine and the words of the 1776 Founders, and shamed the nation into deciding that these ideals meant something. The Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act remade America into something it had never been, bringing the nation closer to what it fancied itself to be.
Lewis, Vivian, and their allies would not have seen themselves this way, but in their imagination and compassion, in their sincere belief in the ideals of the declaration, they surpassed their predecessors. Jefferson said the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants; he did not foresee a rebellion in which the patriots need not have bloodied their own hands, or spilled the blood of the tyrants.
Nevertheless, Lewis, as a young radical, very much saw his movement as an effort to complete the first American Revolution. In his speech at the March on Washington, Lewis exhorted the crowd:
I appeal to all of you to get into 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, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we have long said 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. And then you holler, “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now. We do not want to go to jail. But we will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood, and true peace.
Lewis and Vivian lived long enough to see their revolution begin to unravel. A disciplined legal counterrevolution, a rising white nationalism, and a bipartisan expansion of mass incarceration led by some of those who eulogize the men today reversed or hindered the progress they sacrificed to achieve. Their loss ushers in a compounding tragedy: the passing of their lives into public memory as America’s living memory of Jim Crow apartheid fades into time. Just as the proponents of chattel slavery and the partisans of the Confederacy made propaganda of history to serve the doctrine of white supremacy, there will be those who seek to invert the meaning of the civil-rights struggle, what it battled, and what it achieved.
But Lewis never thought of his struggle as one that would end. “We must accept one central truth as participants in a democracy: Freedom is not a state; it is an act,” Lewis wrote. “It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest.” Lewis and Vivian can now rest. It is up to us to honor them, by continuing what they started, by sustaining the work of democracy as best we can.
====================Do Not Call John Lewis a “Hero” if You Stood in His Way
Joel Anderson, Slate (07/18/20)
On March 9, 1998, John Lewis returned to the site of his bloodiest, most brutal confrontation in the fight for civil rights. Lewis had shown up in Selma, Alabama, that day to commemorate the 33rd anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march, first with a dedication for the old church where the march started, and then to receive a key to the city. Waiting there for Lewis was an old, now bowed, adversary: Selma Mayor Joseph “Joe” Smitherman.
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| Rep. John Lewis rallies for the Voting Rights Enhancement Act on Capitol Hill on February 26, 2019 in Washington, DC. |
But on this day 33 years later in Selma, the times and social mores had changed. Lewis came to town as a living hero, the moral conscience of the country’s greatest deliberative body. Smitherman was thus cast as a different sort of relic of the Jim Crow South, still clinging to power in a small town that represented the worst abuses of the civil rights era. “Back then, I called him an outside rabble-rouser,” Smitherman said during the ceremony. ”Today, I call him one of the most courageous people I ever met.”
Smitherman survived politically for years by winning almost all of the town’s white vote and picking off a few Black voters. In his final election in 2000, two years after he said those nice words about Lewis, he again blamed outside Black agitators for stirring up old trouble. He claimed his black opponent James Perkins brought “people from California, the NAACP, Al Sharpton, all this crowd into Selma to try to affect the outcome of a city race.” Smitherman ultimately lost that race, ending his 35-year reign in Selma.
I thought of Smitherman, whose role in maintaining white supremacy made Lewis’ work necessary in the first place, as an avalanche of tributes to Lewis came in late Friday night and Saturday morning following his death at 80. Who would be the Smitherman, I wondered–the disingenuous antagonist who kept Lewis fighting until his dying breath? Who would attempt to redraw the battle lines to feign allyship with an American hero? Who would shamelessly celebrate the life of Lewis only to work assiduously to thwart his life’s work?
House GOP Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy lauded Lewis as a “patriot in the truest sense,” and posted a picture of himself trailing Lewis on a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 2015. “One of the greatest honors of my life was to join him for multiple trips to Selma to march across the bridge,” he said. But McCarthy has never done anything to show that those trips—meant to commemorate the bloody fight to protect and expand the right to vote—were anything other than timely photo opportunities. When Lewis was co-sponsor of a bill to renew portions of the Voting Rights Act in December, McCarthy and all but one of his Republican members voted against it. As recently as April, McCarthy blasted voting by mail as dangerous for the country and said the system involves “a lot of fraud” while offering no evidence for the claim.
The Cato Institute also sought to align itself with Lewis, calling him a “Libertarian Hero” in a tweet on Saturday morning, linking to a January tribute But only seven years ago, the think tank filed a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling, Shelby v. Holder, allowed nine states, most of them in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval. “It is long past time to declare victory over Jim Crow and move on to a healthier stage of race relations,” the institute wrote. It’s worth remembering that last month, on the seventh anniversary of the Shelby v. Holder decision, Lewis was still urging the court to reconsider. “It is a shame and a disgrace. I urge you to correct course and take action. Time is of the essence to preserve the integrity and promises of our democracy,” Lewis wrote, by then publicly ailing with the stage 4 pancreatic cancer that would kill him. Cato was no more an ally in the fight with Lewis and his supporters than Smitherman and the troopers.
From the state where Lewis settled, raised a family, and launched a political career, Gov. Brian Kemp made his attempt at a testimonial. Lewis “was a Civil Rights hero, freedom fighter, devoted public servant, and beloved Georgian who changed our world in a profound way,” Kemp tweeted Saturday. But it is Kemp who is perhaps the best example of the resistance Lewis faced in trying to change the world.
As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp was at the forefront of a national GOP-led movement to make voting more difficult, from championing photo ID laws to prosecuting residents on specious claims of voter fraud. Kemp directed the removal of 1.5 million voters from the state rolls from 2012 to 2016, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.
While running for governor in 2018 but still serving as secretary of state, Kemp purged the state’s voter rolls in a move that mostly impacted Black voters. Lewis found the conflict of interest so egregious that he called on Kemp to resign. “Brian Kemp is actively abusing the power of his office to make it more difficult for Georgians to vote,” Lewis said then. “His actions make it impossible for voters to trust that this election will be administered in a fair and impartial way.” Kemp eventually prevailed over Stacey Abrams, his Democratic opponent, in the election. He gets to call Lewis a hero from the governor’s mansion.
But most notable among those paying respects Saturday morning was Sen. Mitch McConnell. “He endured hatred and violence,” McConnell said of Lewis in a press release. “But he kept working, because he was convinced that our nation had to be better.”
McConnell was in law school in August 1965 when he was invited to a ceremony to witness then-president Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act. For McConnell, the legislative accomplishment was most impressive not for guaranteeing the franchise for Black Americans but for its bipartisan support. “On issues of great national significance, one party should never simply force its will on everybody else,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2015. Over the years, McConnell managed to fashion himself as a friend to civil rights activists. A New York Times profile in July 2015 referred to his “longstanding commitment to civil rights legislation.” McConnell pointed out that he was raised in Kentucky by parents who opposed segregation and that he’d even attended the March on Washington in 1963, where Lewis was the youngest featured speaker.
But by 2007, McConnell did not appear very committed to the fight that continued to fuel Lewis and his work. That year McConnell proposed an amendment to a Senate immigration bill that would have changed the voting rights act to require that all voters show photo identification. From then on, McConnell was stubbornly against any measures to restore any pieces of the legislation that he’d witnessed signed into law a half-century before. “It’s been a big success. It’s worked,” he insisted of the now-kneecapped Voting Rights Act. “It’s important to understand how different the South is now. America has come a long way.”
Lewis, of course, knew better. He was in the Supreme Court chamber during the challenge to the Voting Rights Act, later telling Ari Berman of Mother Jones that “he almost cried when Justice Antonin Scalia compared the VRA to a ‘racial entitlement.’”
In many ways, McConnell’s betrayal was what kept Lewis working in his final years. “In December 2019, Lewis presided over the House as it passed legislation to restore and modernize the Voting Rights Act, requiring states with a long history of voting discrimination to once again get federal approval for any changes to voting procedures,” Berman writes. “In a primary season marred by voting problems, like six-hour lines in Lewis’ home state of Georgia, it’s been sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk for 225 days.”
Lewis would often bring members of Congress to Selma to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, trying to draw a connection between the conditions that called for his civil rights activism back then and today’s inequality and, sometimes, unrest. Lewis returned to Selma this March for the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, clearly weakened by cancer. Everyone seemed to understand it would be his final time crossing that bridge. A lot had changed since the first march from Selma to Montgomery. For one, Smitherman was long gone; he died in 2005. There were no helmeted state troopers waiting for Lewis and the marchers on the other side. But the fight that defined John Lewis’ life, and the people and institutions that stood in his way, blocking progress, undermining rights, were still there, and he knew it. “I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to give in,” Lewis said that day. “We must use the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America.”
Lewis continued his march for equality long after he survived the beating in Selma. It is an obvious tragedy that so much of his life’s work remained undone, something he alluded to last summer. “Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year — it is the struggle of a lifetime,” he posted on Twitter. But it’s important to remember, as the tributes roll in, the struggle remains because of people like Brian Kemp and Mitch McConnell. They are not the well-meaning allies who just happen to sit on the other side of the aisle. They are not the good men who had reasonable disagreements with a civil rights icon. If John Lewis is a hero, they are the villains.
=================================To honor John Lewis' legacy, need to pass voting rights act
Rep. Karen Bass, ABC News (07/19/20)
To honor the life and legacy of death of death of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that the Voting Rights Advancement Act should be passed.
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| Rep. Karen Bass speaks at a press briefing prior to the House Vote on the Police Reforms Bill on Capitol Hill on June 25, 2020, in Washington D.C. |
"I know that if he was still with us, he would be leading that fight," Bass said of the Georgia congressman who died Friday.
"What we have to do is live up to his legacy. We need to continue that fight for social justice. And again, the first thing we need to do is to pass the voting rights act and get it signed," Bass told ABC's "This Week" Co-anchor Martha Raddatz.
Rep. Val Demings, D-Fla., speaking after Bass on "This Week," also highlighted Lewis' legacy.
"John Lewis has left us a great roadmap. And if we can continue to be half of the servant fighting for social justice that John Lewis was, then we're going to be OK."
In December, House Democrats passed the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, which would restore certain key protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act against racial discrimination that the Supreme Court struck down in 2013.
"I have said this before, and I will say it again. The vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy," Lewis said in a statement supporting the bill in 2019.
Known as the "conscience of the U.S. Congress," Lewis spent over three decades in the House of Representatives after rising as a leader of the 1960s civil rights movement.
A central organizer of the 1961 Freedom Rides, Lewis went on to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), speaking at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the age of 23.
Two years later, in 1965, in what would become known as "Bloody Sunday," Lewis and hundreds of demonstrators in a march for voting rights were beaten by dozens of state troopers in Selma, Alabama. One of the troopers fractured Lewis' skull, scarring his head for the rest of his life.
The events in Selma shocked the country and led, in part, to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
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| In this March 7, 1965, file photo, state troopers swinging billy clubs to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Ala. John Lewis, in the foreground, is being beaten by a state trooper. Lewis sustained a fractured skull. |
In recent years, Lewis had an adversarial relationship with President Donald Trump, refusing to attend his inauguration over claims of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
The president fired back against Lewis days before his swearing-in writing in a tweet that the congressman "should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complain about the election results. All talk, talk talk -- no action of results. Sad!"
At the time, Lewis was one of the first high-ranking Democrats to allege Trump's presidency was illegitimate due to Russia's interference in the election.
The morning after Lewis' death, Bass took to Twitter and urged the president to abstain from saying anything about the civil rights icon.
"While the nation mourns the passing of a national hero, please say nothing. Please don't comment on the life of Congressman Lewis. … Please let us mourn in peace," Bass wrote.
Trump did offer condolences over Lewis' death hours later on Twitter.
"I'm glad that the president's tweet was appropriate … but I think that we need to have the flags at half mast, until he is laid to rest. And I believe that his legacy will live on," Bass said.
ABC News' Benjamin Siu and Elizabeth McLaughlin contributed to this report.
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