A01047 - John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Movement

John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80 Images of his beating at Selma shocked the nation and led to swift passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He was later called the conscience of the Congress. Credit...Andrea Mohin Katharine Q. Seelye By Katharine Q. Seelye Published July 17, 2020 Updated Aug. 4, 2020 1025 Representative John Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality, and who then carried a mantle of moral authority into Congress, died on Friday. He was 80. His death was confirmed in a statement by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, announced on Dec. 29 that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and vowed to fight it with the same passion with which he had battled racial injustice. “I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said. On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against police killings of Black people and, more broadly, against systemic racism in many corners of society. He saw those protests as a continuation of his life’s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sidelines. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story “It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets — to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call ‘good trouble,’” Mr. Lewis told “CBS This Morning” in June. “This feels and looks so different,” he said of the Black Lives Matter movement, which drove the anti-racism demonstrations. “It is so much more massive and all inclusive.” He added, “There will be no turning back.” Give the gift they'll open every day. Subscriptions to The Times. Starting at $25. He died on the same day as another civil rights stalwart, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Mr. Lewis’s personal history paralleled that of the civil rights movement. He was among the original 13 Freedom Riders, the Black and white activists who challenged segregated interstate travel in the South in 1961. He was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated lunch-counter sit-ins. He helped organize the March on Washington, where Dr. King was the main speaker, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Mr. Lewis led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks and swimming pools, and he rose up against other indignities of second-class citizenship. At nearly every turn he was beaten, spat upon or burned with cigarettes. He was tormented by white mobs and absorbed body blows from law enforcement. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story On March 7, 1965, he led one of the most famous marches in American history. In the vanguard of 600 people demanding the voting rights they had been denied, Mr. Lewis marched partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a waiting phalanx of state troopers in riot gear. Ordered to disperse, the protesters silently stood their ground. The troopers responded with tear gas and bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. In the melee, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, a trooper cracked Mr. Lewis’s skull with a billy club, knocking him to the ground, then hit him again when he tried to get up. ImageJohn Lewis, foreground, being beaten by a state trooper during the voting rights march in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965. John Lewis, foreground, being beaten by a state trooper during the voting rights march in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965.Credit...Associated Press Televised images of the beatings of Mr. Lewis and scores of others outraged the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson presented to a joint session of Congress eight days later and signed into law on Aug. 6. A milestone in the struggle for civil rights, the law struck down the literacy tests that Black people had been compelled to take before they could register to vote and replaced segregationist voting registrars with federal registrars to ensure that Black people were no longer denied the ballot. Once registered, millions of African-Americans began transforming politics across the South. They gave Jimmy Carter, a son of Georgia, his margin of victory in the 1976 presidential election. (A popular poster proclaimed, “Hands that once picked cotton now can pick a president.”) And their voting power opened the door for Black people, including Mr. Lewis, to run for public office. Elected in 1986, he became the second African-American to be sent to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction, representing a district that encompassed much of Atlanta. ‘Conscience of the Congress’ While Mr. Lewis represented Atlanta, his natural constituency was disadvantaged people everywhere. Known less for sponsoring major legislation than for his relentless pursuit of justice, he was called “the conscience of the Congress” by his colleagues. When the House voted in December 2019 to impeach President Trump, Mr. Lewis’s words rose above the rest. “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something,” he said on the House floor. “To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ For some, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story His words resonated as well after he saw the video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes as Mr. Floyd gasped for air. “It was so painful, it made me cry,” Mr. Lewis told “CBS This Morning.” “People now understand what the struggle was all about,” he said. “It’s another step down a very, very long road toward freedom, justice for all humankind.” Image Mr. Lewis, third from left, marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., right, from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on March 21, 1965. Mr. Lewis, third from left, marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., right, from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on March 21, 1965.Credit...William Lovelace/Daily Express, via Getty Images When he was younger, his words could be more militant. History remembers the March on Washington for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but Mr. Lewis startled and energized the crowd with his own passion. “By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers,” he told the cheering throng that August day, “we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say: ‘Wake up, America. Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.” His original text was more blunt. “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did,” he had written. President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights bill was “too little, too late,” he had written, demanding, “Which side is the federal government on?” But Dr. King and other elders — Mr. Lewis was just 23 — worried that those first-draft passages would offend the Kennedy administration, which they felt they could not alienate in their drive for federal action on civil rights. They told him to tone down the speech. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Still, the crowd, estimated at more than 200,000, roared with approval at his every utterance. An earnest man who lacked the silver tongue of other civil rights orators, Mr. Lewis could be pugnacious, tenacious and single-minded, and he led with a force that commanded attention. Image Mr. Lewis and a fellow Freedom Rider, James Zwerg, after they were attacked by segregationists in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1961. Mr. Lewis and a fellow Freedom Rider, James Zwerg, after they were attacked by segregationists in Montgomery, Ala., in May 1961.Credit...Bettmann/Corbis He gained a reputation for having an almost mystical faith in his own survivability. One civil rights activist who knew him well told The New York Times in 1976: “Some leaders, even the toughest, would occasionally finesse a situation where they knew they were going to get beaten or jailed. John never did that. He always went full force into the fray.” Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966. He was repeatedly beaten senseless by Southern policemen and freelance hoodlums. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Ala., after he and others were attacked by hundreds of white people. He spent countless days and nights in county jails and 31 days in Mississippi’s notoriously brutal Parchman Penitentiary. Once he was in Congress, Mr. Lewis voted with the most liberal Democrats, though he also showed an independent streak. In his quest to build what Dr. King called “the beloved community” — a world without poverty, racism or war (Mr. Lewis adopted the phrase) — he routinely voted against military spending. He opposed the Persian Gulf war of 1991 and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was signed in 1992. He refused to take part in the “Million Man March” in Washington in 1995, saying that statements made by the organizer, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, were “divisive and bigoted.” In 2001, Mr. Lewis skipped the inauguration of George W. Bush, saying he thought that Mr. Bush, who had become president after the Supreme Court halted a vote recount in Florida, had not been truly elected. In 2017 he boycotted Mr. Trump’s inauguration, questioning the legitimacy of his presidency because of evidence that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story That earned him a derisive Twitter post from the president: “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!” Mr. Trump’s attack marked a sharp detour from the respect that had been accorded Mr. Lewis by previous presidents, including, most recently, Barack Obama. Mr. Obama awarded Mr. Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2011. Image President Barack Obama was joined by Mr. Lewis in Selma, Ala., in 2015 to observe the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. President Barack Obama was joined by Mr. Lewis in Selma, Ala., in 2015 to observe the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times In bestowing the honor in a White House ceremony, Mr. Obama said: “Generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.” To His Family, ‘Preacher’ John Robert Lewis grew up with all the humiliations imposed by segregated rural Alabama. He was born on Feb. 21, 1940, to Eddie and Willie Mae (Carter) Lewis near the town of Troy on a sharecropping farm owned by a white man. After his parents bought their own farm — 110 acres for $300 — John, the third of 10 children, shared in the farm work, leaving school at harvest time to pick cotton, peanuts and corn. Their house had no plumbing or electricity. In the outhouse, they used the pages of an old Sears catalog as toilet paper. John was responsible for taking care of the chickens. He fed them and read to them from the Bible. He baptized them when they were born and staged elaborate funerals when they died. “I was truly intent on saving the little birds’ souls,” he wrote in his memoir, “Walking With the Wind” (1998). “I could imagine that they were my congregation. And me, I was a preacher.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story His family called him “Preacher,” and becoming one seemed to be his destiny. He drew inspiration by listening to a young minister named Martin Luther King on the radio and reading about the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. He finally wrote a letter to Dr. King, who sent him a round-trip bus ticket to visit him in Montgomery, in 1958. By then, Mr. Lewis had begun his studies at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he worked as a dishwasher and janitor to pay for his education. In Nashville, Mr. Lewis met many of the civil rights activists who would stage the lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns. They included the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who was one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of civil disobedience and who led workshops on Gandhi and nonviolence. He mentored a generation of civil rights organizers, including Mr. Lewis. Image Mr. Lewis, right, and a fellow student demonstrator, James Bevel, stood inside the door of a Nashville restaurant in 1960 during a sit-in to protest the establishment’s refusal to serve Black people. Mr. Lewis, right, and a fellow student demonstrator, James Bevel, stood inside the door of a Nashville restaurant in 1960 during a sit-in to protest the establishment’s refusal to serve Black people.Credit...Jack Corn/The Tennessean, via USA Today Network Mr. Lewis’s first arrest came in February 1960, when he and other students demanded service at whites-only lunch counters in Nashville. It was the first prolonged battle of the movement that evolved into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. David Halberstam, then a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean, later described the scene: “The protests had been conducted with exceptional dignity, and gradually one image had come to prevail — that of elegant, courteous young Black people, holding to their Gandhian principles, seeking the most elemental of rights, while being assaulted by young white hoodlums who beat them up and on occasion extinguished cigarettes on their bodies.” In three months, after repeated well-publicized sit-ins, the city’s political and business communities gave in to the pressure, and Nashville became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating public facilities. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story But Mr. Lewis lost his family’s good will. When his parents learned that he had been arrested in Nashville, he wrote, they were ashamed. They had taught him as a child to accept the world as he found it. When he asked them about signs saying “Colored Only,” they told him, “That’s the way it is, don’t get in trouble.” But as an adult, he said, after he met Dr. King and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man was a flash point for the civil rights movement, he was inspired to “get into trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.” Getting into “good trouble” became his motto for life. A documentary film, “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” was released this month. Despite the disgrace he had brought on his family, he felt that he had been “involved in a holy crusade” and that getting arrested had been “a badge of honor,” he said in a 1979 oral history interview housed at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1961, when he graduated from the seminary, he joined a Freedom Ride organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, known as CORE. He and others were beaten bloody when they tried to enter a whites-only waiting room at the bus station in Rock Hill, S.C. Later, he was jailed in Birmingham, Ala., and beaten again in Montgomery, where several others were badly injured and one was paralyzed for life. “If there was anything I learned on that long, bloody bus trip of 1961,” he wrote in his memoir, “it was this — that we were in for a long, bloody fight here in the American South. And I intended to stay in the middle of it.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story At the same time, a schism in the movement was opening between those who wanted to express their rage and fight back and those who believed in pressing on with nonviolence. Mr. Lewis chose nonviolence. Image Mr. Lewis in June 1967. He had been “involved in a holy crusade,” he later said, and getting arrested had been “a badge of honor.” Mr. Lewis in June 1967. He had been “involved in a holy crusade,” he later said, and getting arrested had been “a badge of honor.”Credit...Sam Falk/The New York Times Overridden by ‘Black Power’ But by the time of the urban race riots of the 1960s, particularly in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965, many Black people had rejected nonviolence in favor of direct confrontation. Mr. Lewis was ousted as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966 and replaced by the fiery Stokely Carmichael, who popularized the phrase “Black power.” Mr. Lewis spent a few years out of the limelight. He headed the Voter Education Project, registering voters, and finished his bachelor’s degree in religion and philosophy at Fisk University in Nashville in 1967. During this period he met Lillian Miles, a librarian, teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer. She was outgoing and political and could quote Dr. King’s speeches verbatim. They were married in 1968, and she became one of his closest political advisers. She died in 2012. Mr. Lewis’s survivors include several siblings and his son, John-Miles Lewis. Mr. Lewis made his first attempt at running for office in 1977, an unsuccessful bid for Congress. He won a seat on the Atlanta City Council in 1981, and in 1986 he ran again for the House. It was a bitter race that pitted against each other two civil rights figures, Mr. Lewis and Julian Bond, a friend and former close associate of his in the movement. The charismatic Mr. Bond, more articulate and polished than Mr. Lewis, was the perceived favorite. “I want you to think about sending a workhorse to Washington, and not a show horse,” Mr. Lewis said during a debate. “I want you to think about sending a tugboat and not a showboat.” Mr. Lewis won in an upset, with 52 percent of the vote. His support came from Atlanta’s white precincts and from working-class and poor Black voters who felt more comfortable with him than with Mr. Bond, though Mr. Bond won the majority of Black voters. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Not surprisingly, Mr. Lewis’s long congressional career was marked by protests. He was arrested in Washington several times, including outside the South African Embassy for demonstrating against apartheid and at Sudan’s Embassy while protesting genocide in Darfur. In 2010 he supported Mr. Obama’s health care bill, a divisive measure that drew angry protesters, including many from the right-wing Tea Party, to the Capitol. Some demonstrators shouted obscenities and racial slurs at Mr. Lewis and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus. “They were shouting, sort of harassing,” Mr. Lewis told reporters at the time. “But it’s OK. I’ve faced this before.” Image Mr. Lewis with other members of Congress staging a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives in June 2016, demanding that the Republican-led body vote on gun control legislation after the Orlando nightclub massacre. Mr. Lewis with other members of Congress staging a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives in June 2016, demanding that the Republican-led body vote on gun control legislation after the Orlando nightclub massacre. Credit...Office of Representative Elizabeth Esty, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images In 2016, after a massacre at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub left 49 people dead, he led a sit-in on the House floor to protest federal inaction on gun control. The demonstration drew the support of 170 lawmakers, but Republicans dismissed it as a publicity stunt and squelched any legislative action. Through it all, the events of Bloody Sunday were never far from his mind, and every year Mr. Lewis traveled to Selma to commemorate its anniversary. Over time, he watched attitudes change. At the ceremony in 1998, Joseph T. Smitherman, who had been Selma’s segregationist mayor in 1965 and was still mayor — though a repentant one — gave Mr. Lewis a key to the city. “Back then, I called him an outside rabble-rouser,” Mr. Smitherman said of Mr. Lewis. “Today, I call him one of the most courageous people I ever met.” ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Mr. Lewis was a popular speaker at college commencements and always offered the same advice — that the graduates get into “good trouble,” as he had done against his parents’ wishes. Image Mr. Lewis in 2017. “Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year,” he said, “it is the struggle of a lifetime.” Mr. Lewis in 2017. “Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year,” he said, “it is the struggle of a lifetime.”Credit...Al Drago/The New York Times He put it this way on Twitter in 2018: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” ***** The Life and Legacy of John Lewis Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Lynsea Garrison and Clare Toeniskoetter, and edited by Lisa Tobin A look at the extraordinary life of the civil rights icon. Monday, July 20th, 2020 Michael Barbaro From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” [Music] Michael Barbaro Today: The life, lessons and legacy of John Lewis. I spoke with my colleague, Times editorial board member, Brent Staples. It’s Monday, July 20. Brent, I want to start by going back with you to the time when John Lewis and others began engaging in nonviolent protests as part of the civil rights movement. Where were you during that period? Brent Staples Like everyone else at the time in the middle ‘60s, I was sitting with my parents, watching television — Archived Recording 1 [MUSIC] It’s 11:00 p.m., and time for the reporters and the news. Archived Recording 2 Good evening. Bad news for Alabama today. Some school desegregation strategy has backfired. Archived Recording 3 Policemen occasionally clubbed demonstrators and used a variety of other tactics designed to break their spirit. Brent Staples — and the nightly news of the scenes of people being ravaged by the police in the South in the streets. And I became attuned to the revolution that was unfolding in the South, where people had put themselves in harm’s way to highlight the injustice of Southern apartheid. Archived Recording The Southerners, white and Negro, spattered with ketchup and mustard, sugar, salt and pepper, were carted off, unprotesting to jail. Brent Staples But as I became more politically active, I had difficulty — probably natural difficulty, understanding how one would put oneself on the line to be actually beaten and bloodied, and what the utility of that was. And by that time, the movement in the South had evolved some way. Archived Recording (SINGING) No more brothers in jail. Off the pigs! The pigs are gonna catch hell. Brent Staples By ‘66, you began to get the Black Power slogans. Archived Recording They don’t want us to use Black Power. I got news for them. [LAUGHTER] Brent Staples So I came into consciousness in my teens as a Black Power figure. Archived Recording This is not a riot, it is a rebellion. Brent Staples It was empowering. Archived Recording Number two, you are to be proud of your Black brothers and sisters at Fifth, because a honky cop touched one of them, and they told them, you’ve got to touch all of us. Brent Staples But it took some time into my late teens to begin to understand what had happened coming up to that. And that is when I become aware of what had passed before when I was a younger kid. Michael Barbaro In other words, it took you some time to understand why the nonviolent figures had taken the approach that they had taken. Brent Staples Yes. Michael Barbaro So I want you to take us through John Lewis’s life and how this philosophy you just described was shaped and how it evolved. So where does that story begin? Brent Staples John Lewis, he grows up in rural Alabama near Troy, Alabama. His parents initially were sharecroppers. And you know, sharecropping was a successor form of slavery. So John was born into that. And his parents, they were lucky they saved enough money to buy a farm. But he graduated high school, segregated high school, and wanted to go to Troy State College, which didn’t admit Black people. And he applied and sent in his information. And he never heard back. And he wrote a letter at one point to Martin Luther King. And I presume he wanted some help in desegregating Troy State. And Martin Luther King sent him a roundtrip bus ticket. And he went and he met King, and they formed a relationship. The substance of that, I don’t know, but it was extremely influential for John. And he left Troy not long after that and moved to Nashville. [Music] Brent Staples He went to seminary in Nashville. And there, he met some of the early civil rights figures. He met James Lawson — Reverend James Lawson — who was kind of a philosopher of nonviolent resistance. Lawson had studied Gandhi’s nonviolent movement and the strategies that Gandhi had deployed against Britain during the colonial period. And he’d come back with a deep sense of what the philosophy was and how powerful nonviolence could be. Michael Barbaro And what exactly is the philosophy? Brent Staples I have John’s memoir here. In 1958, I think it is, Jim Lawson mentions to him the idea of, quote, “redemptive suffering.” And he explains that it affects not only ourselves, but it touches and changes those around us as well. It opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves. A force that is right and moral. The force of righteous truth that is the basis of human conscious. Suffering puts us and those around us in touch with our consciences. It open and touches our hearts. It makes us feel compassion where we need to and guilt if we must. So this idea, to him, this redemptive suffering, it is at the heart of the philosophy of nonviolent protest. At the very heart of it. This is a good paragraph from the book: “One method of practicing this approach, when faced with a hateful, angry, aggressive, even despicable person, is to imagine that person — actually visualize him or her — as an infant, as a baby. If you can see this full-grown attacker who faces you as a pure, innocent child that he or she once was, it is not hard to find compassion in your heart.” But then it wasn’t just a tactic. It was a way of life. It was embracing the biblical prescription that one must love one’s enemies. That’s a biblical prescription. And it’s the hardest thing in the world to carry out. Michael Barbaro Well, so how do we start to see this get carried out among Lewis and these seminary students in Nashville? Brent Staples Well, Nashville was itself at the time another southern town, where if you went into a restaurant and sat down the people would just look at you and the waitresses would say, sorry, this place doesn’t serve [EXPLETIVE]. And that would generally be the end of it. But these students came in that place and sat down and asked to be fed. And when they were told that they were not served, they stayed. And they took a lot of abuse from it. And people spat upon them, beat them, battered them, and poured condiments over their heads. All kinds of things. And I remember our friend, David Halberstam, our former colleague, was working at a newspaper there at the time. He was working at The Nashville Tennesseean. And this is one of the things he wrote: “The protest had been conducted with exceptional dignity, and gradually, one image had come into prevail — that of elegant, courteous, young Black people, holding to their Gandhian principles, seeking the most elemental of rights, while being assaulted by young white hoodlums who beat them up and on occasion extinguished cigarettes on their bodies.” So you see John Lewis and others being carried away in these, really, suits and ties and crisp white shirt. And basically refusing to walk themselves, being completely passive and nonresistant. And this worked out extremely — I mean, in a very short period of time, it worked out extremely well in Nashville. After three months of sit-ins, the city basically caved and became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating public facilities. Michael Barbaro So very early on, the protest that John Lewis is beginning to participate in, after he meets Martin Luther King and begins to understand the strategy, they are starting to show real signs of effectiveness. Brent Staples Oh, yeah. Michael Barbaro These peaceful, nonviolent protests. Brent Staples Exactly. Yeah. This is astonishing thing, to me, to this day, to practice the non-violent approach to life. To really embrace it, one needs to understand that the person who was extinguishing a cigarette in your throat because you want to sit down at a luncheon counter is as much a victim as you are. What John was saying — you, in pursuit of justice, you cannot let violence win your heart. That if you do that, you’re surrendering, really, to the dark force that you’re trying to defeat. Michael Barbaro Brent, you’re reading from a memoir that is written in the later years of John Lewis’s life. But my understanding is that this philosophy that he embraced and that he practiced, it was not entirely a foregone conclusion that this would be the way that it went, and that the March on Washington is an example of a moment where we see a young John Lewis grappling with which path he’s going to take. Can you tell us the story of that speech? Brent Staples Well, you see, what I finally figured out is that by the time John Lewis, at the age of 23, gets to the march on Washington — this is the most important public gathering of Black people in the century — he has already been on the Freedom Rides. Integrated groups have taken buses into the deep south to test laws that forbid segregation on interstate transport. He’s been arrested on those trips for going into white-only bathrooms. He’s been beaten just for being on buses with white people. In the end, John ended up being arrested, like, 40 times. Michael Barbaro Right. Brent Staples And if you look at some of the pictures of the mugshots when he’s arrested, you can see him smiling because he’s basically saying, you think you’re afflicting me, but you’re playing into what I want to do. But he’s still 23 years old. That’s all he is. And he basically comes into Washington with a speech. And this one somehow found its way into public. And one of the striking things about it, he tells people to get into the street and stay in the street until the revolution is finished. And he names the sort of racist segregationist senators by name. And state governors, too. Michael Barbaro Wow. Brent Staples I’m going to read from it. “We won’t stop now. All the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, Thurman won’t stop this revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently.” Michael Barbaro Wow. And to explain that reference, he’s referring to the Union General who literally burns large sections of the South during the Civil War. Brent Staples Yes, he’s referring to William Tecumseh Sherman. “We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently. We shall fragment the south into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, wake up, America.” Michael Barbaro Brent, that language doesn’t sound, even as it invokes the word, nonviolent. So what do you think that he meant by those words in that draft? Brent Staples Well, I’ve come to figure out what he meant. Now, understand, as I was saying earlier, by the time he renders this speech, he has become steeped in the nonviolent impulse. But his frame, he was portraying it as a forceful measure that could be as powerful and changing, as was the sweep of Sherman through South Carolina and Georgia. What you have here is, John is working at a very high concept here, right? He’s working at a high concept. He’s saying, we can be — he was essentially arguing that nonviolent protests could be transformative. As transformative and as disruptive as war as carried out by the most feared general in the Union Army. That is itself a very powerful metaphor. And it’s a testament to his beliefs and what his approach could do. And he was calling upon hundreds of thousands of people to come out into the street and make that a reality. But that’s a high concept. And on the evening news, you can imagine you’d end up with a snippet of a scorched earth Sherman burning Atlanta again. Michael Barbaro Right, it might get lost in translation. It might actually undermine the very thing he’s trying to promote. Brent Staples Exactly. So basically, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, those guys prevailed on him to make some changes in it. They were talking about, let’s not do anything to just not give them a sound bite that’s going to give us trouble. I can hear him saying it. I don’t have the tape, but I can hear them saying to John, let’s not give them a sound bite that’s going to give us trouble. You can say it’s a revolution. You can call people on the street. You can even call them the Black masses, if you want to, even though that sounds like communism, right? You could say those things. But let’s leave off Sherman for next time. Right? [LAUGHS] So Sherman goes out. Archived Recording (John Lewis) We march today for jobs and freedom. But we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds of thousands of our brothers are not here. Brent Staples He talks about marching. Archived Recording (John Lewis) The time will come. We will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson — Brent Staples We will march through the street of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. Archived Recording (John Lewis) But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today. [APPLAUSE] By the forces of our demand, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say, Wake up, America! Wake up!” For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient. [APPLAUSE] Brent Staples So this is pretty much the same. But Sherman is missing. Michael Barbaro So in terms of thinking about the speech that John Lewis drafted versus the one he delivered, on that historic day, you’re saying it’s not that the earlier version of the speech shows John Lewis questioning the nonviolent approach. It’s that he believed in the nonviolent approach, but that the language he contemplated using — his belief that the power of that approach could be as powerful as burning — that was determined to be potentially counterproductive to the nonviolent approach he believed in. Brent Staples Exactly. But he talks about going back to his hotel room after that first conversation and just being livid because, of course, it’s a 23-year-old man’s speech. And a 23-year-old man who had been beaten to an inch of his life while fighting for dignity for Black people. I’m sure he felt entitled to say any damn thing he wanted to. Because he had the credibility of the streets behind him and the people in the Douth beginning to know who he was. And they were going to really know who he was, come two years later at the voting rights march at Selma. [Music] Michael Barbaro We’ll be right back. [Music] Michael Barbaro Brent, tell me about that. I mean, let’s talk about what happens after the March on Washington, after John Lewis’s rhetorical wings are ever so slightly clipped, but he does deliver the essential message. How do we see this concept of the power of nonviolence actually play out over the next couple of years? Brent Staples The next big data point becomes the voting rights struggle in Selma, Alabama. Now it’s important, I think, to dilate for just a second for the modern listener. The modern listener needs to understand that in voting arrangements in the South, before the Voting Rights Act, local registrars had complete authority to do whatever they wanted with people who came in to register to vote. They could give you a test and then say you failed it so you can’t register. And they did that all day long, all day, every day, to Black people. In Virginia, a college-educated woman, Black woman, who I believe was a teacher, went into register at one point and filled the application. And the registrar handed her a literacy test. You know what it consisted of? A blank sheet of paper. He asked her, what does this say? And she looked at it and handed it back, and she said nothing. He said, you’re wrong. You fail. You can’t register. Elsewhere in the South, they might ask you if you came in to register to vote, how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap? Elsewhere, a famous example in the film “Selma,” where a woman had come in to register one year, and they asked her, how many judges are there in the state of Alabama? And she didn’t know. They said, well, you fail. And she came back the second year. And he said, how many county judges are there in Alabama? And I think it was 67. And she said 67. And he said now, before you register, you have to name them. Michael Barbaro Aw. Brent Staples So this was what life was like for Black people seeking to vote in the South. Now John Lewis’s organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had already set up a voting rights project in Selma and had been working on that. But it came to fruition in 1965, where people had been fed up. And so they staged a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest in favor of voting rights for Black people. And then that fateful day, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were walking. State troopers came out and said, this is unlawful. Archived Recording It would be detrimental to your safety to continue this march. And I’m saying that this is an unlawful assembly. You have to disperse. You are ordered to disperse. Go home, or go to your church. This march will not continue. Brent Staples You cannot march. Archived Recording Troopers, here, advance toward the gate. See that they disperse. Brent Staples And then John said to the sheriff. He said, can I have a word? Because you know he’s in the front with his little off-white trenchcoat on. And now there’s a thing about this trenchcoat, right? It’s very light, so you can see him standing out from everyone else. And the other thing about it is, once blood gets on it, you can really see it. So I’m sure that that was premeditated. So he comes out front, and he says, can I have a word? No, you can’t have a word. And the troopers begin to advance. And they beat holy hell out of those people. They sent 58 people to the hospital. John Lewis suffers a fractured skull. And by the time the film is flown back to New York to be shown on the air — and it’s really one of those films where you see these people running. You see tear gas and these billy clubs just going up and down, just beating the shit out of people. And because John was in front, you could see him holding his head where he’d been hit. And it was on the ground. Archived Recording Can we have somebody take somebody to a doctor? [CROWD CLAMORING] Brent Staples That, in my opinion — I’m not the historian here — but in my opinion, that was the ultimate triumph of the nonviolent approach and the suffering approach as he was saying. Michael Barbaro Why triumphant? Brent Staples Well, it was triumphant because even people who had tried to look away from what was happening in the South were forced to see the long arm of the law persecuting people publicly. Not just perscute, trying to kill them publicly. And also, the Voting Rights Act was pending at that time. And after this happened, Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of both Houses of Congress, I believe, and said — Archived Recording (Lyndon B. Johnson) It was more than 100 years ago that Abraham Lincoln, the great president of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. But emancipation is a proclamation, and not a fact. A century has passed, more than 100 years since equality was promised. Brent Staples We cannot delay any longer. Archived Recording (Lyndon B. Johnson) A century has passed since the day of promise. And the promise is unkept. The time of justice has now come. We shall overcome. [Music] Brent Staples So the Voting Rights Act was signed later that summer in August. It didn’t take long. So when people come in to register to vote, you can no longer ask them how many bubbles are in a bar of soap, or to name every judge in the state. This is a big leap in our time. Michael Barbaro So quite literally, there’s a straight line between the scene of what happened on that bridge, and something John Lewis knew would be so powerful — the concept of nonviolent suffering — and the legislative remedy back in Washington that resulted. Brent Staples Yes. Michael Barbaro Because the world had seen this happen. Brent Staples Right. Yeah, I think so. But also, you begin to see the sort of apex of this message really is ‘65, ‘66. And at some point, then, John is replaced in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee presidency by Stokely Carmichael, a fiery orator and one of the primary enunciaters of the Black Power movement, that was more consistent with the emerging radicalism of the time. Michael Barbaro And that was the movement that you felt a part of. Brent Staples Yes. That’s where we came into the story, you know? Michael Barbaro Brent, on some level, you and your cohort must have thought that this approach, the John Lewis approach, had limitations. Given that by the time you were a teenager, or maybe even entering your early 20s, there was this new philosophy taking hold of a more elbows out, less restrained approach. So how do you think about that? Brent Staples Well, it’s interesting. And I do think about it. What had happened, really, is every generation, until it educates itself, thinks its experience is unique. So we thought we were unique. My cousins and I, and we had our big meetings, and we had our press conferences. And we had a different rhetorical stance. But in the end, the tools were exactly the same. The tools were the sit-in of the administration building. The tool was the sit-in in the street that ran through campus. The tool was the building takeover. These were the same tools, man. I mean, I had bigger hair, right? Right? And I’ll send you a picture. I’ll have [INAUDIBLE]. Michael Barbaro Please do. Brent Staples I have good hair, though. But if you look back on it, the tools were the same. Michael Barbaro And it was a foundation that had already been built, even if you didn’t see it that way at the time. Brent Staples And even if you didn’t know it. You know what I’m saying? Even if you didn’t know. I keep going back to this point earlier in this story, when they were doing the Freedom Rides in 1961. They had a big Chinese dinner in Washington, that people were going off on these Freedom Rides. And a lot of people wrote their wills, because they thought that they’d be killed — there’s a chance they’d be killed and never come back. And they referred to the meal at the Chinese restaurant as “the last supper.” So these people were willing to put their lives on the line, were willing to accept the possibility that they would be killed in the pursuit of justice, and that their dead bodies laying out in public would be part of a sacrifice that would advance the cause of justice. That’s profound. No? Michael Barbaro Mm-hmm. So with all that in mind, Brent, how are you thinking about John Lewis’s legacy at this moment, as we talk in the middle of yet another critical moment in this movement, and when the work is still understood to be very unfinished. Brent Staples You know, John Lewis, in the waning days of his life, was heartened and overjoyed to see the global protests that unfolded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. He talked about it as part of the extension of his work. And one of the things he said, he essentially — I’m paraphrasing — he said, the thing’s out of the box now. He said, there’s no going back from this. Michael Barbaro Hm. And what about the principles of his life? How are you thinking about those in this moment? Brent Staples Well, I think that, as you see, his point of view was borne out. Archived Recording [SHOUTING] Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me. Brent Staples The other day, The New York Times had a story in which it had 64 examples, video examples of police brutalizing peaceful demonstrators. Michael Barbaro Mm-hmm, I saw it. Brent Staples Right? Now, what is that? What that is, is what John was talking about. He was talking about this kind of injustice perpetrated on people who did not deserve it, did not warrant that kind of treatment. And also, we’ve been seeing in this unfolding of the Floyd protests in — it’s a repeated theme in the news stories — white suburbanites, middle class white people, who supported the police unquestioningly, right? They have changed their minds. Michael Barbaro Hm. Archived Recording [CROWD CLAMORING] Brent Staples The real persuasive thing is seeing people walking around in the street with signs, unarmed, not doing anything untoward, and be brutalized. That turns out to be the most persuasive thing for the society and for the people to whom it has happening. Archived Recording 1 Don’t resist! Don’t resist! Don’t resist! Don’t resist, bro. Archived Recording 2 I’m not! Archived Recording 3 Don’t resist, bro. Michael Barbaro Hm. In other words, we are again seeing this idea of the beloved community playing out, the Gandhian philosophy, this biblical approach that you described. Brent Staples Yes. Michael Barbaro It’s working. It’s painfully working again. Brent Staples Yes, it’s painful. Lord knows it is. It’s painful. But abuse of the people in public — people’s constitutional rights — through violence by police organizations, has broad, rippling consequences. It’s having broad, rippling consequences. It’s beyond the people who you beat up who now don’t have confidence in the police. And John saw all that. Archived Recording [CROWD CLAMORING] Michael Barbaro Brent, is there anything from Lewis’s memoir that you haven’t already shared that you want to leave us with? Brent Staples Well, I don’t know if it fits. But perhaps we should just put that aside and read from one of John Lewis’s favorite poems. It’s “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley: “Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade. And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” [Music] Michael Barbaro Brent, thank you very much. We really appreciate your time today. Brent Staples Well, good to be with you. [Music] Archived Recording Boy, Congressman Lewis joins us now for his first network TV interview since the protests over the death of George Floyd began. Congressman John Lewis, it’s so good to see you. I can’t tell you, you are such a sight for sore eyes today. It’s really good to see you. What would you tell, Congressman, young people, and people, quite frankly, who are not so young, about the best way to seek justice? You know, there’s been a lot of controversy, a lot of talk about the looting. And we should stress that most of the protests were very peaceful. But there was some looting. There was some disruption. What would you say to people about the best way to achieve justice? Archived Recording (John Lewis) It was very moving. It was very moving to see hundreds and thousands of people from all over America and around the world taking to the streets, to the roadways, to stand up, to speak up, to speak out, to do what I call “getting in trouble.” During the ‘60s, the great majority of us accepted the way of peace, the way of love, the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living. There’s something cleansing, something wholesome, about being peaceful and orderly, to stand up and with a sense of dignity, and a sense of pride, and never hate. Dr. King said over and over again, “Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.” The way of love is the much better way. And that’s what we did. We were arrested. Yes, I was beaten, left bloody and unconscious. But I never became bitter or hostile, never gave up. I believed that somehow and some way, if it becomes necessary to use our bodies to have redeem the soul of a nation, then we must do it. Create a society at peace with yourself. [Music] Michael Barbaro That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.