MOBILE, Alabama — For the recently deceased U.S. Rep. John Lewis to lie in state in the Alabama State Capitol on Sunday, a plan announced late this week, is for poetic justice to be served. And served nobly. Lewis really was heroic.
The legacy of Lewis, the civil rights giant who married righteous anger to a fierce commitment to peacefulness and patriotism, doesn’t need yet another tribute added to the innumerable paeans that have been flowing ever since his July 17 death. He’ll get one from me nonetheless, if only to emphasize that white, Southern conservatives also can and in many cases do revere him and the example he set.
Lewis’s politics were quite far left, meaning he profoundly disagreed with us conservatives about which policy solutions were best for today’s world. And understandably, considering what he went through, he seemed to see racism in the aggregate where some of us would ascribe ills to other causes. That is all immaterial. Lewis was a man who maintained the integrity of his beliefs, living how he preached, treating individuals with utmost courtesy and openness of heart, and, of course, standing courageously for racial equality.
Unless someone has been living in a cave, everyone by now has heard the stories of Lewis’s courage under beatings, his commitment to nonviolence among his own protesters, his love of country despite it all, and, of course, his own skull-endangering march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that may one day bear his own name.
But the personal engagements for him were just as important. Everyone on Capitol Hill, or any stranger who approached Lewis at an airport to pay respects, would say the same: This was a man of generous spirit and good will. My local congressman, Bradley Byrne, well captured Lewis’s innate kindness and decency in a tribute Byrne sent to his constituents this week. Byrne, a conservative, white Republican from the home state that once treated the protesting black liberal Lewis so badly, wrote that Lewis approached him and befriended him on the very day Byrne was sworn in to Congress.
“He told me he was born and raised in Troy, Alabama, and though he lived and represented a district in Georgia, he still felt a strong connection to our state,” Byrne wrote. “He offered to help me if he could. He was a big help to me because he was a moral inspiration, a priceless gift in this day and time.”
Lewis and Byrne traveled together numerous times, including to South Africa where they met Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Byrne brought Lewis to Mobile to meet with students and community leaders.
“He talked a lot about the ‘Beloved Community’ and was asked once to define that,” Byrne wrote. “Here’s what he said: ‘It is where we can lay down the burden of separation and live in peace with one another. That we can become one family living in one house, the same house.’ In these days of polarization and division, isn’t that great to hear?”
Byrne is right. More importantly, on the bedrock moral issue of human dignity, Lewis was right. And Alabama is right to honor him, its native son, greatly.
