Let John Lewis’s moral conscience shine as a beacon
In November 2015, I attended Rep. John Lewis’s event at the annual Miami-Dade Book Fair, where he discussed the latest installment of his “March” series — an graphic novel trilogy in which the Georgia congressman hoped to inspire younger audiences with a vibrant account of his struggles during the civil rights movement.
He had published the second entry of “March” during a dark moment in our nation’s history. In 2015, racial tensions had come to a boil following a string of deaths of African American men at the hands of police, including that of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Our country had endured tragedy with the racially motivated murders of nine black churchgoers at the historical Emanuel AME church in South Carolina.
As I perused his novel in the days prior to his event at the Book Fair, the parallels between what he had endured in the ’60s as a young activist confronting the savagery of man with revolutionary fervor, and what our country was going through then, in the mid-2010s, were not lost upon me.
Today, the stakes feel even higher than they did five years ago. As our nation continues to hobble through the COVID-19 pandemic, we are confronted by a crisis of leadership and human dignity. Many of those who possess the reins of power in the highest levels of government have abdicated from their roles in mitigating the pain borne out of the senseless death of George Floyd. Without strong moral leadership, the people have been left to their own devices to solve the nation’s problems.
However, many should look to John Lewis as an example of why moral conscience is a force more often engendered not by the upper echelons of an elite few, but out of the lips and sweat of ordinary people and front-line activists.
Lewis was only 23 years old when he advocated for civil rights legislation during the 1963 March on Washington. Many years before he met leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, he was a young boy tending to the henhouse at his family’s farm in rural, segregated Alabama.
In “March,” Rep. Lewis writes about how before he was even 16, he was galvanized by the sermons of Dr. King and delivered a public sermon of his own in a church in Troy, Alabama. The plaudits that the “boy from Troy” received from the local press and public helped kick-start his lifelong career in civil rights.
As a civil rights activist, Lewis staged Freedom Rides and sit-ins and endured numerous arrests and beatings.
At the Miami-Dade Book Fair, the wizened representative spoke at length of his proclivity for getting into what he has famously dubbed “good trouble.”
He recounted the harrowing tale of how he got his skull fractured by an Alabama state trooper in the epochal march from Selma to Montgomery. He was solemn in describing the lurid details of his beatings, but unwavering in his pacifist zeal.
He spoke of compassion and recounted a particularly moving moment in February 2009 when one of the men who beat him came to him and asked for his forgiveness. “I accepted his apology and he hugged me, I hugged him, and we each started crying together. That is the power of the way of peace,” Lewis said.
In another sign of his remarkable ethos, the representative, only days away from death, expressed opposition to the nowrescinded provisions that would have subjected international college students taking online classes in the fall to deportation. It falls in line with another maxim that he offered at the Book Fair: “In my eyes, there is no such thing as an illegal human being.”
It is a true testament to his incredible life of service that even as the nation loses one of its civil-rights heroes during a time of great darkness and peril that the brilliance of his message and the beauty of his words continues to serve as a powerful beacon for those who march in the name of “good trouble,” forever uplifted by the shadow of Rep. Lewis’s incredible life and legacy.
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