Memphis’ Love Collins III was crucial in Lewis’ campaign for Congress
John Lewis, the “Conscience of Congress,” may not have walked the marble halls of the Capitol as a legislator rather than as a spectator without the assistance of a Memphis man.
Love Collins III, a vice chancellor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, was the “tactical manager” — the mastermind — behind Lewis’ historic, hard-fought and contentious 1986 campaign against Julian Bond for an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In what became a bitter battle between longtime allies in the civil rights struggle, Lewis, the underdog candidate, narrowly defeated Bond in the Democratic primary for Georgia’s 5th congressional district, which includes most of Atlanta.
Lewis handily won the general election and went on to be re-elected 16 times.
He was serving in his 33rd year in Congress when he died July 17 at the age of 80.
Lewis became known as the “Conscience of Congress” for his dedication to the struggle for human rights that characterized his pre-congress career as a young ally of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Freedom Rider and an organizer of the Nashville sit-ins, the March on Washington, the Selma-to-montgomery march and other significant events. This struggle was not just courageous but dangerous: Lewis was imprisoned in Mississippi and beaten by the police, the Klan and various white thugs, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness.
In the decades since the 1986 campaign, Collins and Lewis remained friends, although Collins turned down the opportunity to be Lewis’ chief of staff in Congress and quickly left professional politics behind for careers in business and education.
Said Collins of Lewis: “Every time he would see me he would smile and say, ‘Look at me, I’m still there.’”
A ‘military’ mindset
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (his famous 1976 “Class of Generals” produced literally dozens of generals), Collins brought what he called a “military” mindset to the 1986 election campaign.
“It was one of the most vicious congressional races ever held in the state of Georgia,” said Collins, 65. “It was brutal. I would be lying to you if I told you I didn’t go after that like I did a military campaign.”
Among the campaign’s controversies was a Collins-devised drug test strategy.
Late in the campaign, Lewis took a drug test at a hospital, which determined that he was drug-free. He challenged Bond to do the same. Bond refused, saying he opposed drug tests in the workplace, so he would not legitimize their use in a political campaign.
Collins says he came up with the idea for the drug test. Using military lingo, he says he had “intel” that suggested Bond would refuse and that this would prove advantageous for Lewis, especially among the white voters whose support lifted Lewis to victory.
Because of the racial makeup of Atlanta, “That seat was going to be occupied by an African American,” Collins said. “The question was, who? You have all these titans from the civil rights movement there, but there was only one platform to take it to the national level, and that was the 5th district. It started out with about five candidates going for it.”
By the time the race boiled down to Bond, a veteran state senator, and Lewis, at that time an Atlanta City Council member, Bond was the favorite, according to pollsters and the media. Most influential Black leaders supported Bond, while Atlanta’s newspapers favored Lewis.
“Julian was smooth, good-looking,” Collins said. “John was a little rougher cut. So what the race did, it bifurcated the African American community. John had to be kind of the Little Engine That Could. It was a major upset.” (Bond died in 2015 after a distinguished career that included a dozen years as chairman of the NAACP.)
A chance meeting in Atlanta
According to Collins, his relationship with Lewis was entirely accidental — or fateful, if you will.
The son of an Army officer whose career took him all over the globe, the Columbus, Georgia-born Collins — one of eight siblings — grew up in Japan, Hawaii and “all over the place” before the family settled in Los Angeles, where Collins finished high school.
After serving five years at Fort Benning, Georgia, under his West Point “military obligation,” the newly married Collins — his first wife was Leah Sears, who later became chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court — began working at the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta.
“One of the things I ended up testing and evaluating was the introduction of the ATM,” he said. Although people take it for granted that bills automatically pop from an automatic bank teller, the process of determining “what type of bills would best make their way through an ATM without jamming” and designing a system that would segregate unfit bills from others in the machine was incredibly complex, Collins said.
Next, he worked at the Atlanta headquarters of Bellsouth, one of seven socalled “Baby Bells” created after the Justice Department ordered AT&T to divest itself of its Regional Bell telephone companies in 1984. Collins said he was among those at the start of the newly independent company, helping not only to organize its structure but to create its name, Bellsouth.
Walking in downtown Atlanta one day, Collins passed Lewis while crossing Marietta Street. He introduced himself to the renowned councilman in the middle of the street; Lewis, according to Collins, said “Let’s continue our conversation” and walked back with Collins to the curb.
“I wanted to meet him because he was such a well-known civil rights hero,” Collins said. “Those type of people really impressed us. I was shaking in my boots just talking to him, I was so excited. It’s hard to stand next to him and not want to wave that flag of justice.”
The talk led to an invitation to a meeting at Lewis’ home that night, where the civil rights leader and his associates were devising plans for a possible congressional run. Said Collins: “They decided at that meeting to do it.”
During the weekly campaign meetings that followed, “I started contributing ideas, and he (Lewis), in his own way, positioned me to manage the campaign.” Collins said the title “campaign manager” wasn’t used — “we operated in a nontraditional way” — but “I was the tactical manager, the operations manager.” Also, “I was his treasurer,” filing the required Federal Election Commission reports on campaign finances.
“Throughout that campaign, I spent hours upon hours at John’s side,” Collins said. “Whether it was in meetings, sitting at his home strategizing, in the car taking him somewhere...”
One night at Lewis’ home, “John went down to his basement and came back with about five sheets of paper. ‘That’s my speech that I made at the civil rights
In the decades since the 1986 campaign, Collins and Lewis remained friends, although Collins turned down the opportunity to be Lewis’ chief of staff in Congress and quickly left professional politics behind for careers in business and education.
March on Washington,’ he said,” referring to the famous Aug. 29, 1963, demonstration in which some 250,000 people gathered around the Lincoln Memorial, where speeches were delivered by such leaders as King, NAACP president Roy Wilkins and Lewis, who, as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was one of the so-called “Big Six” who organized the march.
According to Collins, the speech “was written in black ink, in cursive,” with blue ink annotations and cross-outs by Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who reviewed the speech and marked through objectionable passages. “I said, ‘This should be in a museum.’ It shocked me to see that document, it makes you shiver.”
Collins said the Lewis campaign headquarters was a small storefront on Peachtree Street. Intended to hold no more than about 80, it was crammed with some 350 people on the election night of Nov. 4, 1986.
Collins said he was the one who went into a small back room where Lewis waited for the outcome with his wife, Lillian. The news seemed bad until the very end of the night, when a sudden surge in late-counted votes from the north side of the district flipped the results. “My heart was beating and I don’t even know if I was breathing when I walked in there and shut and door and they both looked at me and I put my hand out and said, ‘Congratulations, Congressman.’”
Life after politics
Collins likely could have used that campaign as a springboard into politics or a career-long stint with Lewis, but he turned down Lewis’ chief of staff job offer and chose to remain full time in Atlanta. “I had a 2-week-old baby, and I did not want to commute back and forth to D.C.”
Although Collins left election politics behind, he has remained deeply invested in various public campaigns and causes. His résumé is startlingly impressive.
Some highlights: He has held executive positions at Howard University and Florida A&M; he was vice president of development for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati;
and he was deputy managing director of operations during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, infamous for the Centennial Park bombing. “I was responsible for all the tickets, hotels, transportation, press operations . ... I had 11 million tickets to distribute globally.”
In 2017, Collins — the father of two adult children, Addison Sears-collins and Brennan Sears-collins Fulton, and the husband of Linda Collins — came to Memphis to be vice chancellor for development and alumni affairs at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Working for an educational institution is appropriate for his career, because it was his father’s college experience that helped forge his interest in justice — and his relationship with John Lewis.
“My father and Martin Luther King Jr. were classmates at Morehouse,” Collins said, referring to Morehouse College in Atlanta. “And I knew of John’s relationship with Martin Luther King. So working with John, by extension I felt I was working with them.
“And, yes, I served my country (in the military), but the benefits I received during my lifetime were only possible because of the sacrifices that people like my father and Martin Luther King Jr. and, yes, John Lewis made. So for me, working on his campaign was not a hard sell, it was a requirement.”