I was a product of the sixties. Singing along to Chubby Checker's "The Twist" or the Supreme's "Stop in the name of Love" during my junior high lunch hours was pretty commonplace for my friends and I. Though I thought that I was open-minded and kind to all people; my white blue-collar upbringing placed shuttered lenses over my eyes that I am still trying to shed. John Meachum's most recent book brought more clarity to this shedding process.
John Robert Lewis was an American politician, statesman and civil rights activist and leader who served in the US House of Representatives for Georgia's 5th congressional district until his recent death in July 2020. Lewis's life reads like fiction. Born the 3rd of 10 children to sharecroppers in rural Alabama, his parents never had the fight nor the spirit in them to fully support Lewis's dreams of following Martin Luther King's vision for a "Beloved Community". It was an activist's life, a grueling life, a public life, a courageous life, a life that didn't make sense to his humble parents, who who favored his original plan plan of becoming a preacher.
Although Meacham sometimes lost me in the many names and organizations he presents, I knew that those details were extremely meaningful to a historian, reviewer, and presidential biographer...so the amazing story line was what drew me in. Here was a 25 year old student organizing marches, cafeteria sit-ins, voter registrations for the south's denied black citizens. Even when faced with repeated cruelty at the hands of powerful law enforcement, Lewis didn't quit his dream of changing governmental policies to bring true freedom for his black brothers and sisters.
In August of 1964, John's organization brought compelling stories and testimonies before President Lyndon Johnson in hopes that changes would be made legislatively in order to allow black delegates to attend the Democratic Convention that year. Johnson verbally consented, but politics prevailed. When John's cautiously hopeful group arrived at the Atlantic City center, the regular Mississippi delegation, with great derision, stood and walked out in protest. Their chairs had been purposely pulled so it left the Mississippi Freedom Democratic group to stand alone in that huge arena......eyesores and outcasts once again in the middle of a white crowd. "As far as I'm concerned", Lewis recalled, "Atlantic City was the turning point of the civil rights movement. I'm absolutely convinced of that. Until then, despite every setback and disappointment and obstacle we had faced over the years, the belief still prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen, the system would respond. Now, for the first time, we had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our faces."
And he was right. With the loss of hope, the black freedom movement turned to rioting in larger cities, with leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, whose philosophy totally differed from the non-violent approach of Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. But Lewis never participated in that type of activism. He broke away from the organization he had founded and made a turn to politics. Perhaps that door slamming in his face changed the way that Lewis wanted to fight...for he turned his eye to Washington DC as an insider to bring changes in job opportunities, in housing, in voting disparities for his Black Community.
I have been struck anew in recent years that being raised in a tiny northern all-white town kept me in a bubble that barely paid attention to the "Southern" problems of racism nor the concerns of our Black brothers and sisters. I feel ashamed. March 7, 2021 marks the 56 year anniversary of Selma's Bloody Sunday, where John Lewis and scores of other peaceful activists were brutally beaten by police. My hope is that Americans are challenged to contemplate that past event...and that more scales would fall from our blinded eyes, compelling us to choose change in 2021.
