Black leaders pause to reflect on the civil-rights icon and representative from Georgia, who spent decades calling for activism and \u201cgood trouble.\u201d<\/b>
\nJohn Lewis believed in the American project and wanted to perfect it.
On August 28, 1963, Lewis stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before hundreds of thousands of people, but his mind was on those who could not be there. He thought of the Black people in Danville, Virginia, living under the heavy baton of a police state; of the sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, working for starvation wages; of the three young men facing the death penalty in Georgia for protesting. \u201cWe will go to jail if this is the price we must pay for love, brotherhood, and true peace,\u201d Lewis told the crowd. \u201cI appeal to all of you to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in the streets and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until the revolution of 1776 is complete.\u201d Lewis was just 23 years old. Shortly after he said those words, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech.
Lewis, whose death from pancreatic cancer at age 80 was announced late last night, lived a revolutionary life as an activist, organizer, and representative who became known to many as the \u201csoul\u201d of Congress. \u201cThere were moments when we had the votes [to pass legislation] in terms of sheer Democratic majority, but the will was not there to get things done,\u201d Jaime Harrison, who worked with Lewis as the majority floor director in the House, told me. \u201cIt was always John Lewis who would step up. And when John Lewis got up to speak, everybody listened.\u201d Harrison is now running to unseat South Carolina\u2019s Lindsey Graham in the Senate, on a platform of registering disenfranchised Black voters across the state.
The \u201cmoral clarity\u201d with which Lewis lived his life served as both an inspiration and a model for the generations of leaders who came after him. He showed what patriotism looked like, the Reverend Jesse Jackson told me by phone this afternoon. On March 7, 1965, Lewis led more than 600 protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, Alabama. The marchers were bludgeoned and teargassed by police\u2014Lewis’s skull was fractured. Americans watched the brutality on national television and saw how Black people were being treated in the quest for civil rights. \u201cOur modern democracy was born in front of that bridge\u2014it should be named after John Lewis instead of Edmund Pettus, by the way,\u201d Jackson said.
Lewis placed the right to vote at the center of his mission\u2014a cause picked up by leaders such as Stacey Abrams, whose election-reform organization, Fair Fight, has advocated, lobbied, and sued for access to the ballot. He lived to see historic voting legislation\u2014the Voting Rights Act of 1965\u2014signed into law. He also lived to see it gutted.
\u201cIt had to be frustrating for him to literally be engaged in the activism that led to the Voting Rights Act, and then see a generation that wasn\u2019t vigilant in preserving the gains that he made,\u201d Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey told me. \u201cI get a little angry because I know this will be a period where people will laud him with praise\u201d but won\u2019t \u201cjoin in his purpose.\u201d Senator Mitch McConnell, who honored Lewis in a statement, has had a bill that would modernize the Voting Rights Act sitting on his desk for more than 200 days.
Lewis\u2019s moral authority was expansive, and he addressed iterations of injustice as they presented themselves: from police brutality to poverty to limits on same-sex marriage. He challenged not only his enemies, but also his allies\u2014those who broadly supported the movement for rights and equality but did not go far enough in eradicating inequities. \u201cWe must be bold, brave, courageous, and push and pull until we redeem the soul of America and move closer to a community at peace with itself, where no one will be left out because of race, color, or nationality,\u201d Lewis said last month during a virtual roundtable with Barack Obama, speaking of this summer\u2019s nationwide protests against police violence.
\u201cToday ought to be a great day of mourning not just for John Lewis, but for the nation that didn\u2019t really listen to him,\u201d the Reverend William Barber II, the civil-rights activist and a co-chair of the Poor People\u2019s Campaign, told me. \u201cImagine if we had really listened to John Lewis?\u201d What if, instead of simply mourning, Barber added, people chose to live the life that he lived? \u201cIt\u2019s time we start to emulate their lives, not just in some memorial fashion, but in actual policy and political evolution and transformation.\u201d
America would benefit if it showed courage in the face of injustice, Lewis wrote inThe Atlantic in 2014. Six years later, he expressed pride as he watched his legacy in action: a new generation of activists fighting for equality. \u201cThey had learned from his example, even if they didn\u2019t know it. They had understood through him what American citizenship requires, even if they had heard of his courage only through history books,\u201d President Obama said in a statement today. Obama himself was a beneficiary of that legacy. On the day the former president took the oath of office, Lewis asked him to sign a commemorative photo. \u201cBecause of you, John,\u201d Obama wrote.
For Americans to honor Lewis\u2014Harrison, Barber, and others I spoke with told me\u2014would be to pass voting-rights legislation, to fight for fair wages, and to uproot the inequality baked into American systems. \u201cThere are lots of ways to honor him. And I will be very frustrated if we stop it with words, and not with real legislative action,\u201d Booker said.
Lewis was more than an activist or a statesman, Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told me. \u201cI think of him as a founding father.\u201d
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