America lost a hero on Friday. Not just blue America or red America, black America or white America. A nation that feels particularly fractious in these troubled times can at least unite in sorrow and mourning for the loss of John Lewis, the civil rights giant who made the United States better live up to its ideals.
The Georgia Democrat spent the final third of his life representing the state’s 5th District in the House of Representatives, but his career as a civil rights activist began a generation earlier. By age 20, Lewis had become one of the now-legendary Freedom Riders who used civil disobedience and nonviolent protests not just to enact social change, but also to push racist arms of government to enforce equal rights under the law.
In Lewis’s passing, we also lose the last living organizer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. Lewis was just 23 years old on the day that King addressed the nation and changed the world on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Lewis’s passion for peaceful protest permeated his congressional career, leading to his arrest outside of the Sudanese embassy when he protested the genocide in Darfur and the sit-in of House Democrats after the Pulse nightclub shooting of 2016 in Orlando, Florida. But though Lewis has been rightly heralded as a Democratic giant, he never let partisanship get in the way of either his independence or his fealty to decency.
Lewis never balked at breaking from Democratic leaders. He did so during Bill Clinton’s welfare reform efforts. He stood alone in supporting gay marriage when Barack Obama did not. But perhaps more prescient in recent months were televised mic drops of Lewis putting aside partisanship in the most contentious of political times to reassert civility.
Even as the House was in the thick of the impeachment inquiry regarding Trump’s dealings in Ukraine, Lewis gave a heartfelt goodbye to his longtime friend, Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson. Such grace was par for the course for Lewis, who had Republican friends and admirers from Rob Portman to Kevin McCarthy, as he convinced allies across the aisle to join him on his regular pilgrimages to Southern sites of his civil rights crusades.
Lewis had every reason in the world to lose faith in humanity as a whole and in his political foes in particular. Barely out of boyhood, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and permanent scars on his head from law enforcement. Yet even when he stood up to the president, he still stood up for the sort of humanity and grace that transcends partisan warfare. Lewis may have struggled with an unwinnable battle against cancer, but he never lost his fight.
“Maybe our forefathers and foremothers all came to this great land on different ships, but we are all in the same boat now,” Lewis once said. He liked to quote his former civil rights mentors in his speeches. Lewis could reconcile such passion for justice with sanguinity about political opposition because he had been in the eye of the hurricane, the worst of our nation’s history — the time and place where Americans robbed an entire race of its God-given rights. Lewis knew there was one America, even when his opposition refused to believe as much, but in the end, and marching toward the gates of heaven, he never faltered. In Lewis’s America, everyone was worth saving, even from themselves.
