Remembering a civil rights icon
Last of the Big Six activists dies of pancreatic cancer
People pay their respects at a makeshift memorial at the base of a mural of Rep. John Lewis, D-GA., on Saturday in Atlanta, Ga. Lewis, a civil rights icon, died at 80 on Friday.
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People paid great heed to John Lewis for much of his life in the civil rights movement. But at the very beginning — when he was just a kid wanting to be a minister someday — his audience didn’t care much for what he had to say.
A son of Alabama sharecroppers, the young Lewis first preached moral righteousness to his family’s chickens. His place in the vanguard of the 1960s campaign for Black equality had its roots in that hardscrabble Alabama farm and all those clucks.
Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, was the youngest and last survivor of the Big Six civil rights activists who organized the 1963 March on Washington, and spoke shortly before the group’s leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to a vast sea of people.
If that speech marked a turning point in the civil rights era — or at least the most famous moment — the struggle was far from over. Two more hard years passed before truncheonwielding state troopers beat Lewis bloody and fractured his skull as he led 600 protesters over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Searing TV images of that brutality helped to galvanize national opposition to racial oppression and embolden leaders in Washington to pass the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act five months later.
“The American public had already seen so much of this sort of thing, countless images of beatings and dogs and cursing and hoses,” Lewis wrote in his memoirs. “But something about that day in Selma touched a nerve deeper than anything that had come before.”
That bridge became a touchstone in Lewis’ life. He returned there often during his decades in Congress representing the Atlanta area, bringing lawmakers from both parties to see where “Bloody Sunday” went down.
More brutality would loom in his life’s last chapter. He wept watching the video of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minnesota. “I kept saying to myself: How many more? How many young Black men will be murdered?” he said last month.
Yet he declared, or at least dared to hope: “We’re one people, we’re one family. We all live in the same house, not just the American house but the world house.”
Lewis earned bipartisan respect in Washington, where some called him the “conscience of Congress.” His humble manner contrasted with the puffed chests on Capitol Hill. But as a liberal on the losing side of many issues, he lacked the influence he’d summoned at the segregated lunch counters of his youth, or later, within the Democratic Party, as a steadfast voice for the poor and disenfranchised.
He was a guiding voice for a young Illinois senator who became the first Black president.
“I told him that I stood on his shoulders,” Obama wrote in a statement marking Lewis’s death. “When I was elected President of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made.”
Lewis was a 23-year-old firebrand, a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, when he joined King and four other civil rights leaders at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York to plan and announce the Washington demonstration. The others were Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Negro American Labor Council; James L. Farmer Jr., of the interracial Congress of Racial Equality; and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.
At the National Mall months later, he had a speaking slot before
King and toned down his intended remarks, bowing to pressure that incensed him.
“I wanted it to have an air of militancy,” Lewis said.
He dropped a reference to leading a “scorched earth” campaign across the South, like Civil War Maj. Gen. William Te
Local, state leaders recall Lewis’ impact
Local and state leaders expressed their condolences and mentioned the impact of civil rights activist and U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-GA., who died Friday at the age of 80.
■ U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, D-amsterdam: “Brother John, as he was affectionately known to so many of us, was a timeless beacon of moral light who guided our nation through some of its darkest days. In our years of service together, he time and again offered me the gifts of his courage, his warmth, and his friendship. History is etched with the markings of his fierce and humble courage and generous spirit, forged in an iron crucible that seemed to glow from within him.
“I will forever cherish his visits to our region, including when he received an honorary doctorate of laws from Union College, and the point he made of speaking to our youngest children and in particular our children of color. His wisdom and example have long lifted the spirits and gaze of generations, and his legend will continue to do the same for generations to come.”
Sen. Kirsten Gilli
■ brand, D-NY: “Congressman John Lewis was an American legend, whose courage and leadership in the civil rights movement and the House of Representatives laid the foundation for a more equal and just future. It was a tremendous honor to work alongside John Lewis on many important issues, from fighting discrimination to expanding voting rights. While today our country mourns the loss of an icon, John Lewis’ legacy will live on in every American who believes in and fights for freedom and justice.”
Thearse Mccalmon of ■
Schenectady, Democratic candidate for state Senate: “Today we mourn, but we rejoice as well. Without the courage and audacity of John Lewis, SNCC and Dr. King, many of us would not be able to get in the way, or get into ‘good trouble’ and make the changes that needed to happen; voting rights, integration of schools and neighborhoods etc. The fight continues! As we navigate through this pandemic, and Black Revolution, let us resemble the legacy of Congressman John Lewis. Let’s get out there, be brave, courageous, and get in the way! Disrupt! Let’s get into good trouble so that we can finally seal the lid on hate, and move forward with love and unity.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo:
■
“John Lewis was one of the greatest men this country has ever known — a man of unimpeachable integrity, wisdom, courage, and morality. He was our conscience. And I know I speak for the entire family of New York when I say we are devastated by this loss. It’s especially painful to lose Congressman Lewis at a moment when we need him most — when division, fear, and anger are ram
cumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea. (“John, that doesn’t sound like you,” he recalled King telling him.) He scaled back criticism of President John Kennedy’s civil rights record.
It was a potent speech nonetheless. He vowed:
“By the forces of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in an image of God and democracy.”
His words were soon and for all time overshadowed by the speech of King. “He changed us forever,” Lewis said of King’s oratory that day.
But the change the movement sought would take many more sacrifices.
After months of training in nonviolent protest, demonstrators led by
Lewis and the Rev. Hosea Williams began a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Alabama’s capital in Montgomery. They didn’t get far: On March 7, 1965, a phalanx of police blocked their exit from the Selma bridge. Authorities swung truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback, sending many to the hospital. The nation was horrified.
“This was a face-off in the most vivid terms between a dignified, composed, completely nonviolent multitude of silent protesters and the truly malevolent force of a heavily armed, hateful battalion of troopers,” Lewis wrote. “The sight of them rolling over us like human tanks was something that had never been seen before. People just couldn’t believe this was happening, not in America.”
King swiftly returned to the scene with a multitude, and the march to Montgomery was made whole before the end of the month.
Lewis was born on Feb. 21, 1940, outside Troy, in Alabama’s Pike County.he was a teenager when he first heard King, then a young minister from Atlanta, preach on the radio. They met after Lewis wrote him seeking support to become the first Black student at his local college. He ultimately attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary and Fisk University instead, in Nashville, Tenn.
Soon, the young man King nicknamed “the boy from Troy” was organizing sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests while challenging segregation around the South. Lewis helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to organize this effort, led the group from 1963 to 1966 and kept pursuing civil rights work and voter registration drives for years thereafter.
President Jimmy Carter appointed Lewis to lead ACTION, a federal volunteer agency, in 1977. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council, and then won a seat in Congress in 1986.
Humble and unfailingly friendly, Lewis was revered on Capitol Hill. He met bipartisan success in Congress in 2006 when he led efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, but the Supreme Court invalidated much of the law in 2013, and it became a work in progress.
Lewis initially endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, but belatedly backed Obama when it became clear he had more Black support. After Obama’s swearingin, he signed a commemorative photograph for Lewis that reflected much more than his endorsement, writing “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.” Later, they marched hand in hand in Selma on the 50th anniversary of the attack.
And when Obama was succeeded by a president who sought to dismantle much of his legacy, Lewis made no effort to hide his pain.
Lewis refused to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration. When Trump later complained about immigrants from “s---hole countries,” Lewis declared, “I think he is a racist ... we have to try to stand up and speak up and not try to sweep it under the rug.”