From Barack Obama, when awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mr. Lewis: “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.”
John Lewis' Connection to Emory
Mr. Lewis earned honorary doctorate of law degree from Emory University on May 12, 2014. Emory Law School established a Chair position named after John Lewis in 2015. The John Lewis Chair in Civil Rights and Social Justice.
President Wagner said, “Lewis is a man who, at every turn of his life, has courageously lived by the dictum of getting in the way.” “John Lewis belongs here – actually, he belongs anywhere that people struggle in good faith to explore ways to protect human rights and secure civil liberties.
Biography
On Saturday, July 18th, we lost Georgia Congressman John R. Lewis, one of our nation’s greatest civil rights leader, following a battle with pancreatic cancer.
Congressman Lewis was born in 1940 near Troy, Alabama, which was a segregated, rural community where the lynching of black men and women was commonplace. He was the third-born of ten children and lived with his family on a sharecropping farm owned by a white man. As a young man, Mr. Lewis was inspired by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, whose sermons he listened to on the radio. He wrote a letter to Dr. King, who responded by sending a bus ticket for Mr. Lewis to visit him in Montgomery, Alabama in 1958. Mr. Lewis moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he studied at the American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) while working as a dishwasher and janitor to pay his tuition. There, he met and was influenced by civil rights leaders and proponents of civil disobedience. Mr. Lewis was first arrested in 1960, when he and other students peacefully demanded to be served at a lunch counter for whites only in Nashville. David Halberstam, a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean, 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 1961, Mr. Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders, who rode buses across the south to protest against segregation. The group consisted of black and white men and women, the youngest of which was an 18-year old student of Morehouse College, Mr. Charles Person. Mr. Lewis was 21 years old and represented the Nashville civil rights movement. The goal of the Freedom Rides was to test compliance with two Supreme Court rulings, one which declared that segregation of bathrooms, waiting rooms, and lunch counters was unconstitutional (Boynton vs. Virginia) and another that found segregation on interstate buses and trains to be unconstitutional (Morgan vs Virginia). The first ride, on May 4, 1961, consisted of two buses traveling from Washington, DC to New Orleans. The Riders encountered violence in a bus station in Rock Hill, SC, and were faced with an angry mob in Anniston, Alabama. In Anniston, ku klux klan members were given permission to attack the riders, and one of the buses was firebombed. The passengers were beaten by the mob as they fled from the burning bus. The second bus was able to continue, and made it to Birmingham, Alabama, where they would encounter more brutal attacks. Many more violent encounters would follow. The movement continued to grow, and later that year consisted of hundreds of participants, many of whom were arrested and spent weeks in filthy prison cells. The courageous actions of the Freedom Riders led to passage of key civil rights legislation. On May 29, 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy petitioned to ban segregation in interstate bus travel. This order went into effect on November 1, 1961, leading to the removal of Jim Crow signs from stations, waiting rooms, water fountains, and restrooms in bus terminals. The Freedom Riders were also instrumental in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the end, 436 riders participated in more than 60 Freedom Rides.
Mr. Lewis emerged from this era with a reputation as a fearless civil rights leader who could harness the power of nonviolence. In 1963, he became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and in that role, he helped to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech. In Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, Mr. Lewis led a march of six hundred people across the Edmund Pettus bridge to protest for Black people to have the right to vote, an event that became known as Bloody Sunday. Alabama troopers attacked the peaceful protesters with tear gas, clubs, rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire, and bullwhips and trampled them with horses. Mr. Lewis’s skull was fractured by a trooper who beat him with a billy club, hitting him repeatedly as he tried to get up, and Mr. Lewis was left lying unconscious on the ground. The Bloody Sunday protest images were televised, and the national outrage led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson. That bridge in Alabama is still named after Pettus, a US Senator who was also a confederate officer and a grand dragon of the Alabama ku klux klan. Mr. Lewis traveled to Selma every year to commemorate the brutal events of Bloody Sunday, and in 1998, he was finally given a key to the city.
During a relatively quiet period in his life, Mr. Lewis headed the Voter Education Project and graduated from Fisk University in Nashville in 1967. He also met Lillian Miles, a librarian, teacher, and Peace Corps volunteer. He married Lillian in 1968 and they had one son, John-Miles Lewis. Lillian passed away in 2012 at Emory University Hospital.
As an activist, Mr. Lewis was arrested around 40 times and he was repeatedly beaten by the police and white supremacists. He was arrested numerous times, spending countless days and nights in jail. “Getting into good trouble” became his lifelong motto. He moved towards politics, and had an unsuccessful run for congress in 1977, but was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981. Mr. Lewis was then elected as a Georgia Congressman in 1986, running against civil rights figure Julian Bond. Congressman Lewis represented the 5th district, which encompasses such areas as the city of Atlanta, Decatur, East Point, Forest Park, and College Park. He was nicknamed “the conscience of congress” by his colleagues because he stood up for disadvantaged people everywhere. At the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, Mr. Lewis handed the President a piece of paper and asked him to sign it. President Obama wrote, “Because of you, John.” In 2011, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.
As a congressman, Mr. Lewis continued to be outspoken against wrongdoing, inaction, and oppression. He was arrested for protests in Washington, DC several times, outside embassies, protesting apartheid in South Africa and genocide in Darfur, Sudan. He skipped the inauguration of George W. Bush in 2001 because he said that Mr. Bush had not been truly elected by the people. He led a sit-in on the US House of Representatives floor to protest federal inaction on gun control following the massacre at an Orlando, Florida nightclub in 2016. Mr. Lewis boycotted the Trump inauguration in 2017 because he questioned the legitimacy of the election. Regarding the impeachment of President Trump in 2019, Mr. Lewis said “when you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.”
Congressman Lewis had been inspired by recent protests and demonstrations for racial justice across America, saying that the protesters will “redeem the soul of America and move closer to a community at peace with itself.” He saw the protests as a continuation of his life’s work. He said that the Black Lives Matter movement “looks and feels so different,” adding that it is “so much more massive and all inclusive” and that “there will be no turning back.”
Sources:
John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80, New York Times, July 17th 2020, Katharine Q. Seelye
Who Were the Freedom Riders?, New York Times, July 18, 2020, Derrick Bryson Taylor
John Lewis’s Legacy and America’s Redemption, July 27, 2020 issue, The New Yorker Magazine, comment by David Remnick
'He saw the best in all of us.' Obama, Trump, Bush, lawmakers react to Rep. John Lewis' death, USA Today, July 18, 2020, Savanna Behrmann