It’s largely forgotten now, but Rep. John Lewis, the Democratic congressman from Georgia, civil rights crusader, and “conscience of the Congress” who died last week at 80 after three decades in office, almost didn’t make it into the House of Representatives.
A sharecropper’s son from south Alabama, Lewis was studying for the ministry in Nashville when, in 1960, he joined the accelerating civil rights movement by organizing sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters and became one of the original Freedom Riders who challenged segregation across the South. An admirer and acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr., Lewis was a founder and the first chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or the SNCC, which translated King’s principles into peaceful demonstrations and stoic witness against Jim Crow. For this, he was beaten, assailed by mobs, arrested 40 times, and repeatedly jailed, once spending a month in Mississippi’s famous Parchman Penitentiary.
Lewis knew “that we were in for a long, bloody fight … in the American South, and I intended to stay in the middle of it,” he recalled in a memoir years later. That fight took him from street marches and bus stations to the 1963 March on Washington where, as the fiery 23-year-old SNCC leader and the youngest speaker, he vowed that “we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy.” One year later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act became law. And one year after that, in March 1965, Lewis and some 600 marchers for voting rights were stopped by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where his skull was cracked by a trooper’s club and struck again as he lay on the ground.
Lewis’s injuries that day probably had as much as anything to do with swift congressional passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act a few months later. But the climax of the modern campaign for civil rights proved to be a turning point in Lewis’s life. The SNCC was riven by internal dissension between Lewis’s devotion to nonviolence and growing demands for more “militant” action. In 1966, he was ousted as chairman by Stokely Carmichael, whose clarion call for “black power” was designed to push a movement for racial integration in directions at odds with King’s principles and distasteful to Lewis.
He returned to Nashville to earn his bachelor’s degree at Fisk University and devote himself, by way of the Voter Education Project, to translating the promise of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act into full citizenship and burgeoning political power for black people throughout the South.
Including, as it turned out, for himself. In the mid-1970s, Lewis ran unsuccessfully for Congress but was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981 and, in 1986, challenged his onetime SNCC colleague and Georgia state Rep. Julian Bond in the Democratic primary for an open congressional seat. Bond was the prohibitive favorite: Glib, boyishly handsome, and a veteran political star, he not only attracted the support of prominent Democrats and admiring journalists but enjoyed a huge advantage in nationwide fundraising and led the opinion polls.
In a memorable televised debate, however, Lewis struck a blow for his singular virtue: authenticity. Contrasting his own blood-stained service on the civil rights front lines with Bond’s celebrity status, Lewis exhorted voters to “think about sending a workhorse to Washington and not a show horse … I want you to think about sending a tugboat and not a showboat.” And to the surprise of nearly everyone, including, perhaps, Lewis, the tugboat won.
His margin of victory was narrow but significant: Bond won a majority of the black vote, but Lewis prevailed by attracting white voters. And while Lewis, in Congress for the next three decades, was a faithful soldier-in-arms for fellow Democrats, he never forgot the primary lesson of the movement to which he devoted his life: that progress requires conciliation as well as conflict, as proven by the journey of a sharecropper’s son to the status of icon beloved by all.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
