RIP, John Lewis
Two weeks ago John C. Lewis passed away. He served in the US House of Representatives from 1987 until his death, representing a district in Georgia. But perhaps even moreso than that he is known as a civil rights icon. In the 1950s and 60s he was a student and then a colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He's one of the few from that era who survived long enough to carry the flame of the civil rights struggle into the modern day.
Rep. John C. Lewis, 1940-2020, Civil Rights Hero (image via Wikimedia Commons)Lewis was eulogized today by three previous US presidents- Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton- at the church in Atlanta where King preached decades ago. Obama's soaring speech, in particular, reminded me that I need to write about Lewis.
Students of modern US history know some of the events that Lewis was involved in. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he helped organize, and participated in, a number of sit-ins, marches, boycotts, and other non-violent protests.
Among the most notorious was a march he led in 1965 across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, AL, which became known as Bloody Sunday (wikipedia link). After the governor denounced the demonstration as "a threat to public safety" (Hmm, does that sound like something that's happened multiple times in the past few months?) the county sheriff sent police officers and just-deputized racist volunteers to wait on the other side of the bridge, weapons in hand, with explicit instructions to beat the non-violent demonstrators (Hmm, does that also sound like something that's happened multiple times in the past few months?). More than a dozen marchers were injured badly enough to require hospitalization. Lewis himself was among them, suffering a fractured skull.
Bloody Sunday was hardly the only time Lewis risked life and limb for civil rights. In fact he did it routinely, and from a relatively early age. That's something that Obama emphasized in his eulogy. Before Lewis became one of the original Freedom Riders (wikipedia link) testing the desegregation of interstate buses in 1961 he tried his own freedom ride. Sixty years ago there was no threat of cellphone video available to ward off mob violence. It was the film era. But in testing out the idea with a friend Lewis didn't have a reporter riding along with him to take pictures or even take notes. He just had his own courage. On that first ride he emerged unscathed, though later in the year he was beaten and arrested, as were hundreds of his compatriots. Simply for sitting where racists didn't think they belonged. He was 20 years old and already laying his life down on the line for what was right.
Rest in peace, John Lewis.
Rep. John C. Lewis, 1940-2020, Civil Rights Hero (image via Wikimedia Commons)Lewis was eulogized today by three previous US presidents- Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton- at the church in Atlanta where King preached decades ago. Obama's soaring speech, in particular, reminded me that I need to write about Lewis.
Students of modern US history know some of the events that Lewis was involved in. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he helped organize, and participated in, a number of sit-ins, marches, boycotts, and other non-violent protests.
Among the most notorious was a march he led in 1965 across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, AL, which became known as Bloody Sunday (wikipedia link). After the governor denounced the demonstration as "a threat to public safety" (Hmm, does that sound like something that's happened multiple times in the past few months?) the county sheriff sent police officers and just-deputized racist volunteers to wait on the other side of the bridge, weapons in hand, with explicit instructions to beat the non-violent demonstrators (Hmm, does that also sound like something that's happened multiple times in the past few months?). More than a dozen marchers were injured badly enough to require hospitalization. Lewis himself was among them, suffering a fractured skull.
Bloody Sunday was hardly the only time Lewis risked life and limb for civil rights. In fact he did it routinely, and from a relatively early age. That's something that Obama emphasized in his eulogy. Before Lewis became one of the original Freedom Riders (wikipedia link) testing the desegregation of interstate buses in 1961 he tried his own freedom ride. Sixty years ago there was no threat of cellphone video available to ward off mob violence. It was the film era. But in testing out the idea with a friend Lewis didn't have a reporter riding along with him to take pictures or even take notes. He just had his own courage. On that first ride he emerged unscathed, though later in the year he was beaten and arrested, as were hundreds of his compatriots. Simply for sitting where racists didn't think they belonged. He was 20 years old and already laying his life down on the line for what was right.
Rest in peace, John Lewis.