Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,914

This is the grave of John Lewis.

What to even say about John Lewis? He’s such a well known figure and a hero to almost everyone who knows anything about civil rights history or contemporary liberalism. But let’s do the bio anyway.

We shouldn’t forget that while many of the civil rights leaders came out of the middle and upper middle classes of Black America (there really wasn’t much of an upper class to speak of), Lewis did not. He grew up very very poor after his 1940 birth outside of Troy, Alabama. This was agricultural land. Sharecropping was disappearing fast, but no one left in this region was getting wealthy with anything else. There were almost no white people around; Lewis remembered only seeing 2 white people before he was 6 years old. The schools weren’t very good for him either, but he sure did what he could to learn and his teachers did what they could to help him succeed. He was inspired by the preachers he had heard at church and wanted to become one.

In 1955, Lewis heard Martin Luther King on the radio and like so many young people, found him inspirational. Lewis was already preaching at this time and already getting involved in civil rights. By 1958, he knew both King and Rosa Parks personally. He was ready to challenge segregation, so he applied to Troy University. He wanted to sue for discrimination after he was denied admission, but King advised against this, saying it would put his family at risk. Instead, Lewis went to Fisk University in Nashville. There, he became a leader in the sit-in movement in 1960, which desegregated that city after four students at North Carolina A&T University had done this in Greensboro shortly before.

This all led to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. An interesting story about all this is that Ella Baker, who knew everyone in the civil rights movement going back decades, advised Lewis and the other young activists and her advice was to stay the hell away from Martin Luther King, who would try to co-opt everything they did. She strongly urged them to be independent and do what they thought was right, not what was convenient to King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This was no united movement and never was.

Truly committed to the ideals of SNCC, Lewis became of the first Freedom Riders in 1961. He was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted, in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He was out of action for a short time, but was soon back on Freedom Rides in Alabama and Mississippi, where he was arrested and sent to Parchman Farm, the notorious prison. He was beaten again in Alabama, to the point where he lost consciousness in the Montgomery bus station.

But these rides changed America. This launched Lewis into leadership in the civil rights movement. In 1963, Charles McDew stepped down as SNCC chair and Lewis was elected to replace him. That placed him on the stage for the March on Washington that August. By this time, SNCC activists were increasingly furious at continued violence they faced. Lewis wanted to give a militant speech that threw it in the face of the government. But the point of the March was to get the Kennedy administration to push what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and so the big leaders all had to convince Lewis to tone it down for the larger cause. He did so, quite reluctantly.

Lewis was a major organizer of the voting rights activism in Alabama. He was the SNCC leader most in charge of the Selma voting movement. Of course, on March 7, 1965–Bloody Sunday–the Selma police decided to beat the ever living shit out of the civil rights marchers, including Lewis. You can see it on film, the cop just hammering Lewis. In fact, he had a dent in his head the rest of his life from the beating he took. This was all captured on camera and led to Lyndon Johnson announcing his support for the Voting Rights Act.

By 1966, SNCC was changing rapidly. The anger over continued white supremacy had led to growing militancy and a rejection of the nonviolence that dominated the early years of the organization. Lewis was militant up to a point, but he really did believe in nonviolence. So he left the organization that year, with the rise of Black Power under Stokley Carmichael. SNCC became a lot less relevant after this too. While I am not here to criticize people for rejecting nonviolence, it’s certainly true that SNCC just became smaller and more disconnected from the larger struggles as it moved away from these ideas.

Lewis was out of the spotlight for several years. He did finally get his degree from Fisk. He worked briefly in New York for the Field Foundation. He moved back to Atlanta to run the Southern Regional Council’s Community Organization Project and then in 1970, became the director of the Voter Education Project. This stuff was important–as the 60s moved into the 70s, the big events faded from the news headlines but there was tons of work to do to consolidate the victories of the last decade and to build community capacity for Black politics, not to mention deal with the declining cities of that next decade. This all allowed Lewis to build a power base in his adopted home town. He did not win his first effort to go to Congress, losing the 1977 primary to replace Andrew Young to the white Democrat Wyche Fowler. Lewis worked in the Carter administration after that for a few years. In 1981, he ran for Atlanta City Council and won that.

In 1986, Lewis returned to the public spotlight, running for Congress again. This time he won, with Fowler moving onto the Senate. Of course he became not only a liberal lion but perhaps the single most respected member of the Democratic Party during his long tenure in Congress. He was in congressional leadership at times, but really he was a moral leader and a representative of how civil rights had made the Democratic Party the party of Black voters. That may be slipping a tiny bit today, which is one of many reasons to be scared of what is happening to America, but it worked for a good half-century, even if Democrats alienated its racist white base at least it had a new base to replace it.

Lewis was basically the senior moral compass of the Democratic caucus. His time in Congress is less interesting than the rest of his career. This post is also long enough, so I will refrain from a further conversation about all of this. Lewis died in 2020, at the age of 80, perhaps the most beloved single person in the Democratic Party. He had become an establishment figure for sure and this annoyed some progressives later in his life. It happens. It’s OK to disagree. Lewis wasn’t perfect either.

John Lewis is buried in South View Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other SNCC activists, too many of which are forgotten today, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Oretha Haley is in Metairie, Louisiana and Lonnie King is in Canton, Georgia. Both of these people were critically important figures are are totally unknown. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.