john lewis
John Lewis was able to take his activism from the streets into Washington by running for office. How would you assess is overall importance in the fight for racial equality in America?
KG: John Lewis was a key figure in SNCC, which was the younger, more radical counterpart to such established civil rights organisations as the NAACP and the SCLC. An aspiring minister, Lewis grew up in Georgia, like many of his generation observing the accommodation of his elders to the indignities of Jim Crow segregation. While attending Fisk University in Nashville, Lewis encountered the Rev James
Lawson, a local African American minister who preached a message of Gandhian nonviolence as a tool to fight injustice. As a SNCC leader, Lewis participated in the Freedom Rides, an initiative by black and white activists to test a new federal law desegregating interstate travel. Attacks on the Freedom Riders by white vigilantes, with the collusion of local police departments made international headlines, embarrassing the Kennedy administration. Lewis was hospitalised along with fellow riders after being attacked by a mob in Birmingham. Lewis recovered, and as one of the speakers at the March on Washington, voiced impatience at the Kennedy administration’s non-enforcement of civil rights. Lewis is perhaps best remembered as leading a march of campaigners for voting rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965. That peaceful assembly was violently dispersed by baton-wielding state troopers, some mounted on horseback. Beaten unconscious, Lewis was hospitalised and the shocking televised news footage of the Bloody Sunday attack galvanised the nation, leading eventually to the Voting Rights Act passed by Congress in 1965.
Lewis’s courage and sacrifices as a civil rights activist contribute to his stature and moral authority as a congressman representing Atlanta in the House of Representatives. Lewis has been an outspoken critic of escalating attacks on voting rights by conservatives since 2010. He is a powerful symbol of racial reconciliation as well, in public encounters with men who sought forgiveness for having brutalised him during the movement.