TThe death of John Lewis, the Alabama-born civil rights activist Freedom Rider and student leader-turned-Georgia congressman, represents a generational transition in America’s long struggle for black freedom, dignity and citizenship. A disciple of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who experienced brutal and repeated acts of violence by racist white police officers and vigilantes who left him with permanent physical scars, including a broken skull, Lewis remained stubbornly determined in his insistence that the life of blacks mattered.
As a student organizer, Lewis faced repeated arrests, jail terms, and death threats during protests to end the Jim Crow racial segregation system that maintained complete dominance over American democracy. His lifelong quest to create what he later characterized as “a good problem” made him a quintessential figure of the times, one whose authentic love for poor and illiterate peoples was based on his own humble origins that began in a shotgun shack in 1940, outside Troy, Alabama.
Lewis’s calm demeanor, southern accent, and Lewis’s genuine humility led his opponents and even his friends to underestimate him. Indeed, it contained multitudes, a complexity that reflects the wealth of the movement and the era that formed it.
As chair of the Nonviolent Student Coordination Committee (SNCC), Lewis compared a personal and tactical commitment to nonviolence with a passion for ending a caste system rooted in racial slavery, segregation, poverty and violence. His youth militancy was exhibited at the March in Washington in 1963, where he promised to help lead an unremitting quest for racial justice and citizenship:
“We should say, ‘Wake up America. Awake!!!’ Because we can’t stop, and we won’t be patient. “
By 1966, black impatience within the SNCC prompted Lewis’s expulsion from the group in favor of Stokely Carmichael, a friend-turned-rival who would help popularize the term “Black Power!”
Lewis’s brand of silent outrage seemed out of step with a revolutionary era, but he remained committed to the new political possibilities opened up by the combined power of civil rights legislation and Black Power awareness.
Two decades after being replaced as SNCC president, Lewis won a surprise victory over his former colleague Julian Bond to become a member of Congress. Over the next 30 years, Lewis proved to be a determined legislator who, in most cases, sided with the underprivileged of all stripes and maintained an uncompromising advocate of racial justice.
After endorsing Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, she switched sides and took a risk with a young Illinois senator who identified himself as part of the “Joshua Generation” thanks to activism by King and Lewis.
Barack Obama’s election helped secure Lewis’s national veneration, as he, unlike Jesse Jackson, became the black president’s first favorite living civil rights icon. But Lewis’s growing national recognition as the “conscience of Congress” sometimes obscured the faltering nature of American racial progress.
Lewis stood firm before Selma when blows rained, and in doing so witnessed the depth and breadth of white supremacist violence against peaceful protesters. In the Obama era, Lewis’s heroism became part of a triumphant national narrative about the civil rights movement that extolled the sacrifice of 1960s veterans who allowed for contemporary liberties, including Obama’s staggering elections in 2008 and 2012.
But as the galvanic national and global protests following the murder of George Floyd have revealed, the levels of equality of blacks that were allegedly won during the heroic era of the movement have proved largely illusory. Like the apparent permanence of watershed legislation, such as the Voting Rights Act, which has been largely restricted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby v Holder, which undermines democracy by sanctioning tactics of voter suppression.
The Black Lives Matter movement highlighted the importance of Lewis’s extraordinary and ongoing commitment to ending systemic racism and defeating white supremacy. Lewis, at a young age, recognized the fight for black freedom as a marathon and not a sprint. In this regard, he met and admired Malcolm X, even while retaining an unwavering commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience. Lewis retained a special love for King, but embraced the recent BLM protests that have rocked the world as a highly anticipated calculation that could complete the fight for dignity and citizenship that he waged all his life.
Lewis’s most important legacy, then, surpasses the real and imaginary triumphs that resulted in his election to Congress, friendship with Obama, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and widespread admiration from supporters and even former adversaries that he claimed throughout his life and politics. race. His most important legacy lies in his service-oriented political leadership, the unapologetic fight for black dignity and citizenship, and the embrace of a younger, more combative generation of activists who reminded him and the nation of the still unfinished business of achieve racial justice in and around the United States. the world.
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