Author sees rights leader as ‘prophet’
Few things are harder for journalists and writers of popular nonfiction books than to let fly with unalloyed openness of spirit, the kind espoused and embodied by that great American John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman who died last month. You have to tip your cap to Jon Meacham for having the courage to dive right in and say straight out: He sees Lewis as a contemporary saint, and not just because of the beatings and the scars and the arrests, but because his heart always stayed true and open and at peace.
“I believe that the American soul is an arena of perennial contention between our worst instincts and our better angels, and John Lewis is a better angel,” Meacham told The Chronicle over Zoom this week. “He is the pilot light, the buoy, pick your metaphor. If we were all more like him, we would have that brighter, better, nobler story. And that’s why I wanted to tell his story.”
He may be a former journalist and bestselling author, but over time Meacham has developed into a moral philosopher. His Aug. 20 Democratic National Convention speech for Joe Biden was subtle and powerful, and Meacham’s new book, “His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope,” isn’t a traditional biography.
The book, which was released Tuesday, Aug. 25, is not a doorstop. It’s not a scholarly and exhaustive life study to earn purred murmurs of approval from academic journals. Meacham talks directly to the reader, his eyes burning, his voice calm but quaking with emotion.
“Lewis was a prophet of the mountaintop, a signpost in the wilderness,” he writes. “In pointing toward the perfect, he insisted that a moderate course was no course at all, only a continuation of the wrong. He understood sin, but he chose to see the depravity of the world as something to be fought, not to be accepted.”
To be fought, that is, with love. We here in California know all about being mocked for talking too much about love, but that was what Lewis was all about, especially the Greek ideal of agape, which he saw as a higher love for all of humanity.
“We’re one people, one family,” Lewis told me in 2019 when I visited him in his Capitol Hill office for book research, which I wrote about in The Chronicle in July. “As Dr. King said, ‘Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.’ Lay it down. Respect the dignity and worth of every human being.”
The words carried unbelievable power, because of the truth of John Lewis’ life: raised in a shotgun house in rural Alabama, the big figure in the family during his first seven years being his greatgrandfather, born a slave. Meacham offers a brisk, informative tour of remarkable events so relevant to us now, like “The Freedom Rides: 1961” and “Birmingham and Washington: 1963,” the year Lewis was the youngest speaker to address the quartermillion people gathered for the March on Washington.
Meacham takes the familiar story of the scars and bruises on John Lewis’ body as literally an embodiment of the struggles of the civil rights era, and
brings alive with cinematic conviction the backstory of how specifically those blows came about.
I asked Meacham whether he agreed that the Lewis ideal of agape was the precise polar opposite of the zeroempathy style of Donald Trump. “That’s exactly right,” he said. “It’s the other extreme for most of us, but particularly from the president. What I wanted to achieve here was to remind religious people, in particular, of what religion is supposed to do. It’s supposed to be an instrument of grace, and
“His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope”
Jon Meacham (Afterword by John Lewis) Random House (368 pages, $30)
reaching out, and not holding tight. The other thing that emerged to me, that I hadn’t focused on, was how biblical John’s life is. John’s first memory was of his mother’s garden. So it all begins in a garden.”
Earlier this year, Meacham had asked Lewis what he dreamed about at night — and instantly knew he had the ending for his book: “‘Oh, God, yes, I dream about those days,’ Lewis said, shortly before he succumbed to cancer and died at home in Atlanta on July 17, 2020. ‘I dream of marching, of singing. I hear the music of the movement in my dreams, and the sounds of our feet on the pavement, one after another. I don’t have nightmares — I don’t relive the beatings in my dreams, at least not that I ever remember. …’
“‘Maybe in my mind the good forces are always at work. There is a power of the mind to believe and think on the higher drama of it … the light, not the dark. … I’ll dream of a march, of moving forward, of light and warmth and happiness. And then I’ll wake up and think, “Oh, that was just a dream.” But you have to believe that it can be real, that it can be more than a dream.’ ”