John Lewis’ life shows young people how to act on their hopes
When I look at all the pictures of people who managed to score a photo or selfie with civil rights icon John Lewis, one of the things that stands out is that he always had time. Or rather, he always made time. Back in 2015, when the longtime Georgia congressman was being hurried along on a schedule to campaign for the reelection of then-jacksonville, Florida, Mayor Alvin Brown, he made time to interview with me. As handlers peered at their watches, Lewis posed for pictures with me — and virtually everyone else who asked for one.
Especially the young people. At stops at two churches, he stuck around to talk to teenagers and young adults about the civil rights struggle. It was a struggle that had him enduring spittle and cigarette burns from Nashville racists in 1960 when he tried to integrate the lunch counter at Mclellan’s Variety Store.
Lewis was 20.
It was a struggle that almost got Lewis killed in 1961, when a mob of white people beat him and left him in a pool of his own blood at the Montgomery, Alabama, Greyhound station during a Freedom Ride.
He was 21.
Then, four years later, Lewis faced death again when an Alabama state trooper fractured his skull with a nightstick as he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965 — an event that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
He was 25.
Lewis now belongs to the ages. He died July 17 at age 80, after pancreatic cancer proved to be more formidable than the beatings and head blows from racists who tried to silence him more than 60 years ago.
Yet he leaves a lesson in how it’s possible for young people to break away from momentary struggles and immediate gratifications to fight for their future.
In Lewis’ case, that future was one in which young Black people wouldn’t have to suffer the brutality and indignities he suffered to go to a library, or to eat at a lunch counter, or to vote.
For young Black people today, what’s important is a future free of poverty, joblessness and systemic disparities that keep so many of them mired in despair.
It’s also a future that is free of an atmosphere that forces their parents to coach them on how to be so nauseatingly accommodating to abusive police in order to not be killed.
Kind of like what Lewis had to deal with when his parents told him not to get into trouble by defying everyday racism; by doing things like not moving off the sidewalk to let white people pass, or anything that would upset racist expectations of passivity from Black people.
But just as Lewis was fearless and smart in channeling his anger over segregation and racism into activism, young people today can do the same thing.
And scores of them are.
They’re doing it through the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in Memphis and around the nation following George Floyd‘s death after white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly 9 minutes.
The video of Floyd’s May 25 death resonated in much the same way that the footage of 1965’s Bloody Sunday march did. That march galvanized national outrage; outrage that called more people, Black and white, to the cause of civil rights and led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
It also solidified Lewis’ stature as a young leader in the same way that Memphis’ protests are giving rise to activists like 34-year-old Theryn C. Bond, whose fire for fighting injustice began in her college days, and 25-year-old Amber Sherman, who has grown weary of the Black trauma wrought by invisibility and inequality.
And now, Congress is working on legislation targeting police misconduct and racial bias in policing. On top of that, some cities are looking at ways to use money normally earmarked for law enforcement to deal with issues that fuel crimes in poverty-strapped communities like Memphis - communities where many young people’s struggle for everyday survival rob them of the luxury to believe in a better future or in their power to shape it.
Lewis’ life has bolstered hope for young people in these times. It offers the example of how raw activism, followed by political action, can create the future that they want and deserve.
His life, a life he began as a child of Alabama sharecroppers, shows how young people, no matter how deeply they may be mired in the despair of whatever moment in which they’re living, have the power to overcome that.
That is if they make the time for it. Like Lewis did. For his future.
And for the future of us all.