leader of the civil rights movement who risked his life numerous times marching for the right of all Americans to vote: 13-term Democratic Congressmember John Lewis of Georgia. He was a leader of the civil rights movement who marched side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King. He served as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, helped organize the Freedom Rides and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. He has been arrested more than 40 times and has just written a new book called Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change.
John Lewis talking:
It is unreal, it is unbelievable, that at this time in our history, 47 years after the Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law, that we’re trying to go backward. I think there is a systematic, deliberate attempt on the part of so many of these states—not just Florida, but it’s all across the country, it’s not just Southern states—to keep people from participating. I think there is an attempt to steal this election before it even takes place, to make it hard, to make it difficult for our seniors, for our students, for minorities, for the disabled to participate in the democratic process. It’s not right, it’s not fair, and it’s not just.
there’s this make-believe that if we do not purge, if we do not weed out some of these people, they’re going to come out and vote, and they’re going to vote not the way that some people would like for them to vote. They’re primarily Democratic voters. It makes me want to just cry, after people gave a little blood, after some people were beaten, shot and murdered trying to help people become registered voters. I can never forget the three civil rights workers that were murdered in the state of Mississippi on the night of June 21st, 1964; other people shot down in cold blood; the march from Selma to Montgomery, where 17 of us were seriously injured. And we passed the Voting Rights Act. We renewed the act. We extended the act. And then the state of Florida, the state of Georgia, Alabama and other states throughout the nation come along with tactics to make it hard, to make it difficult for people to participate. We should be making it easy and simple and open up the political process and let all of the people come in.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 said, in effect, that you cannot use a literary test, you cannot have a poll tax, you cannot use certain devices, you cannot harass, you cannot intimidate. And before you make any changes in election laws dealing with registration, changing a precinct, local lines for any political position, you have to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice or the federal district court in Washington, D.C. So, the state of Florida, for an example, never sought to get clearance to purge. And they’re hiding behind there may be fraud. That’s their own.
On March 7, 1965, a group of us attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to dramatize to the nation that people wanted to register to vote. One young African-American man had been shot and killed a few days earlier, in an adjoining county called Perry County—this is in the Black Belt of Alabama—the home county of Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr., the home county of Mrs. Ralph Abernathy, the home county of Mrs. Andrew Young. And because of what happened to him, we made a decision to march.
In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn’t or couldn’t pass the literacy test. On one occasion, a man was asked to count the number of bubbles on a bar of soap. On another occasion, a man was asked to count the number of jellybeans in a jar. There were African-American lawyers, doctors, teachers, housewives, college professors flunking this so-called literacy test. And we had to change that, so we sought to march.
And we got to the top of the bridge. We saw a sea of blue—Alabama state troopers—and we continued to walk. We came within hearing distance of the state troopers. And a man identified himself and said, “I’m Major John Cloud of the Alabama state troopers. This is an unlawful march. It will not be allowed to continue. I give you three minutes to disperse and return to your church.” And one of the young people walking with me, leading the march, a man by the name of Hosea Williams, who was on the staff of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, “Major, give us a moment to kneel and pray.” And the major said, “Troopers, advance!” And you saw these guys putting on their gas masks. They came toward us, beating us with nightsticks and bullwhips, trampling us with horses.
I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. I had a concussion at the bridge. My legs went out from under me. I felt like I was going to die. I thought I saw Death. All these many years later, I don’t recall how I made it back across that bridge to the church. But after I got back to the church, the church was full to capacity, more than 2,000 people on the outside trying to get in to protest what had happened on the bridge. And someone asked me to say something to the audience. And I stood up and said something like: “I don’t understand it, how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam but cannot send troops to Selma, Alabama, to protect people whose only desire is to register to vote.” The next thing I knew, I had been admitted to the local hospital in Selma.
my mother, my father, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, and people all around me had never registered to vote. I had been working all across the South. The state of Mississippi had a black voting age population of more than 450,000, and only about 16,000 were registered to vote. On that day, we didn’t have a choice. I think we had been tracked down by what I call the spirit of history, and we couldn’t—we couldn’t turn back. We had to go forward. We became like trees planted by the rivers of water. We were anchored. And I thought we would die. I first thought we would be arrested and go to jail, but I thought it was a real possibility that some of us would die on that bridge that day, after the confrontation occurred. I thought it was the last protest for me. But somehow and someway, you have to keep going. You go to a hospital, you go to a doctor’s office, you get mended, and you get up and try it again.
we continued to organize, continued to try to get people registered. We went to federal court, testified, to get an injunction against Governor George Wallace and the Alabama state troopers. And the federal court said that we had a right to march from Selma to Montgomery. President Johnson spoke to the nation and condemned the violence in Selma, introduced the Voting Rights Act. And that night, he made one of the most meaningful speeches that any American president had made in modern times on the whole question of civil rights and voting rights. He condemned the violence over and over again, and near the end of the speech he said, “And we shall overcome. We shall overcome.” We call it the “We Shall Overcome” speech.
I was sitting next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as we listened to President Johnson. I looked at Dr. King. Tears came down his face. He started crying. And we all cried a little when we heard the president saying, “We shall overcome.” And Dr. King said, “We will make it from Selma to Montgomery, and the Voting Rights Act will be passed.” Two weeks later, more than 10,000 of us, people from all over America, started walking from Selma to Montgomery. And by the time we made it to Montgomery five days later, there were almost 30,000 black and white citizens—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, men, women, young people. It was like a holy march. And the Congress debated the act, passed it, and on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law.
Dr. King spoke out of his gut. Sheriff Clark was a very mean man. He was vicious. I think maybe he was a little sick. He wore a gun on one side, a nightstick on the other side. He carried an electric cow prodder in his hand—and he didn’t use it on cows. That you use to move cattle along. And I remember on one occasion he was wearing a button on his left lapel that said “Never.” He thought he was a general in a military. He would wear a helmet like Patton. He forced a group of young children on a false march, which was so cruel, so vicious and so evil. He took them down a highway and said, “If you want to march…” And he had people just chase these little children on horseback. I saw him one day when a group of black women were trying to march, primarily black schoolteachers, that he literally put his foot on the neck of a black woman. We were peaceful. We were orderly. We believed in the philosophy, in the discipline of nonviolence. We were trying to appeal to the conscience of everybody.
On May 9th, 1961, my seat mate, a young white gentleman, we arrived at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina. We got off the bus. We were testing the facilities—the lunch counters, the waiting room, the restroom facility. During those days, the stations were marked “white waiting,” “colored waiting,” “white men,” “colored men,” “white women,” “colored women.” And we were following a decision of the United States Supreme Court banning discrimination—or segregation in intrastate travel. And when we started to enter the so-called white waiting room, we were attacked by a group of young white men, beaten and left in a pool of blood. The local police officials came up and wanted to know whether we wanted to press charges. We said, “No, we believe in peace. We believe in love and nonviolence.”
Years later—to be exact, 48 years later—Mr. Wilson and his son came to my office in Washington and said, “Mr. Lewis, I’m one of the people that beat you. Will you forgive me? I apologize.” His son had been encouraging his father to do this. His son started crying. Mr. Wilson started crying. He hugged me. His son hugged me. I hugged them both back. Then all three of us stood there crying. That’s what the movement was about, to be reconciled.
it is so important for people to understand, to know that people suffered, struggled. Some people bled, and some died, for the right to participate. You know, the vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool that we have in a democratic society. It’s precious. It’s almost sacred. We have to use it. If not, we will lose it.
Speech on August 28th, 1963. I spoke number six. Dr. King was the last speaker. He spoke number 10. That day, when A. Philip Randolph introduced me, and he said, “And I present to you, young John Lewis, national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” I looked to my right, I saw many other young people sort of cheering me on; looked to my left, and I saw young people up in the trees trying to get a better view of the crowd; then I looked straight ahead, and I said to myself, “This is it. I must do my best.” And that’s what I tried to do.
When I was working on the speech, I was reading a copy of the New York Times, and I saw a group of black women in southern Africa carrying signs saying, “One Man, One Vote.” So in my March on Washington speech, I said, “‘One man, one vote’ is the African cry; it is ours, too. It must be ours.” And that became the rallying cry for many other young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
I was asked to change the speech. Some people thought the speech was too radical, too militant. I thought it was a speech for the occasion. It represented the people that we were working with. Some people didn’t like the use of the word “revolution” or the use of the phrase “black masses.” A. Philip Randolph came to my rescue and said, “There’s not anything wrong with the use of ‘revolution.’ I use it myself sometimes. There’s not anything with ‘black masses.'” So we kept that part in the speech. But near the end of the speech, I said something like, “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day may come when we will be forced to march through the South the way Sherman did—nonviolently.” And people thought we couldn’t make a reference to Sherman, and so we deleted that.
One of the reasons, A. Philip Randolph, this wonderful man, this prince of a man, had always dreamed of a march on Washington. You couldn’t say no to A. Philip Randolph. And then you had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saying to me, “John, this doesn’t sound like you.” I love those two men. Dr. King was my hero, my inspiration. And for the sake of unity, I made a decision to change the speech, to delete some of those words.
This is part of “To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that ‘patience’ is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient. We do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence. …
“We won’t stop now. All of the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace and Thurmond won’t stop the revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground!—nonviolently”
I did raise the question, “I want to know: which side is the federal government on?” because it appeared, in certain parts of the South, the federal government was not on the right side of history. It appeared that the federal government was not a sympathetic referee in the struggle for civil rights. We felt that the federal government could do more, the Department of Justice could do more, the FBI could do more, than just stand back and take pictures. We thought they could prevent some of the violence and protect people that were being arrested, being beaten and being killed.
I believe, that the proposed civil rights bill was not enough. President Kennedy took the position that if a person had a sixth grade education, that person should be considered literate and should able to register to vote. Those of us in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee took the position that the only qualification for being able to register to vote in America should be that of age and residency, nothing more or anything less. We wanted a much stronger bill.
But the whole idea of the march was not to support a particular piece of legislation. It was a march for jobs and freedom. It was a coalition of conscience to say to the Congress and say to the president of the United States, “You must act.” We didn’t think that the proposed bill was commensurate to all of the suffering, to the beatings, to the jailing, to the killing that had occurred in the South.
We met Malcolm in Nairobi, Kenya, at the New Stanley Hotel. He happened to be staying there—we didn’t know he was staying there—and we were also staying there. We were on our way to Zambia for their independence celebration. And we had an opportunity to talk and chat with him about what was going on in America. And I think at that time Malcolm was seeking to find a way to identify with the Southern civil rights movement. He wanted to be helpful, wanted to be supportive. And as a matter of fact, he came to Selma. He came to Selma, February the 14th, 1965. And we were in jail, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the local authority refused to let him come and meet with us. He spoke at the Brown Chapel AME Church with Mrs. King to a group of high school students. And seven days later, he was assassinated. On February 21st, 1965, he was gunned down. I will never forget it, because February 21st is my birthday. And I was in a car on my way from southwest Georgia.
I think Malcolm played a major role in helping to educate, inform and dramatize the need for mass movement. People read about him. Many of the young people, black and white, read his story. Many did not agree necessarily with his techniques or his tactic. But if Malcolm had lived, I am convinced that he would have been part of the Southern nonviolent wing of the civil rights movement.
I remember Malcolm being in the hotel, before we even saw him in Kenya, the night of the March on Washington—the evening before the March on Washington. He was at the Hilton Hotel in Washington. Now, he didn’t like the way the march turned out, because he said it was like a picnic and that it was not strong enough. He was not invited to speak. We—I didn’t have anything to do with that decision.
I supported the position of Martin Luther King Jr. As chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, during that time, we had already taken a position against the war in Vietnam. So many of the young people in SNCC, so many of the young people that we were working with all across the South were being drafted and going off to Vietnam, so we came out against the war in January 1966. But I was there at Riverside Church on the night of April 4th, 1967, when he spoke. And I think that speech is one of the greatest speeches. A lot of people speak about the March on Washington. It was a wonderful speech. But the speech against the war in Vietnam, Dr. King—he said, “I’m not going to segregate my conscience. If I’m against violence at home, I’m against violence abroad.” And he went on to say that America was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. He was a preacher. He was a prophet.
We spend hundreds and thousand, millions and billions of dollars on weaponry. We’re supplying the world. We sell arms to everybody. Dr. King was saying that we have to put an end to this madness. He was influenced by Gandhi, and Gandhi said it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. Dr. King went on to say, “We must learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we will perish as fools.” He was saying, in effect, that we have enough bombs and missiles and guns to destroy the planet. He said it then, and it’s still true today.
At the time, Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” That’s the Dr. King 1967 speech against the war in Vietnam. The Washington Post declared King had, “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
I think it’s so unfortunate that publications like Time magazine, Washington Post — if they had to rewrite those articles today, it would be a different story. Dr. King was right. He was right—and so many others, politicians, who came out against the war, whether it was Eugene McCarthy or others, later Bobby Kennedy. What that war helped to destroy: the hopes, the dreams and aspiration of so many people. War is bloody. It’s messy.
I think it’s time for us to end, end the efforts in Afghanistan. We cannot justify the killing of people that we don’t see. We don’t know anything about them, or very little. War is not the answer. War is obsolete. It cannot be used as a tool of our foreign policy. It’s barbaric. Someplace, somehow, people must come to that point and say, “I ain’t gonna stay the war no more.”
(John Lewis voted in—three days after September 11, 2001, to give President Bush the authority to retaliate in a vote that was 420 to 1.)
I was very disturbed about what happened on 9/11. And when I look back on it, if I had to do it all over again, I would have voted with Barbara Lee. It was raw courage on her part. So, because of that, I don’t vote for funding for war. I vote against preparation for the military. I will never again go down that road.
I support the soldiers. When I see young men in uniform, I say, “Thank you for your service.” And I tell them, “I want all of you to come home.” I tell them to their faces. I see them in the airports. I see them in Washington. I say, “It’s time for you to come home.”
The latest book is Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change. Faith is this belief, this sense that somehow and someway we will overcome. It’s belief that, in spite of all the odds, setbacks, delays, interruption, that we will make it, that we will arrive at a place where we recognize and respect the dignity and the worth of every human being. It’s in keeping with the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence to believe that we will and we shall overcome, that we will not get lost in a sea of despair, that we will not become bitter or hostile, but with our faith, we know that victory is there. It may take longer. It may be difficult. But you come to that point where there’s no turning back. Without that sense of faith, we wouldn’t be where we are today. People ask me all the time why you didn’t give up, why you didn’t turn back, why you didn’t fight back. My faith kept me going, kept me grounded, kept me anchored.
it’s my hope that President Obama and the Democratic Party will recapture the hopes, the dreams that people had four years ago, and have a platform, a program, where we must go now. How do we rescue and save people? How do we give people a feeling that they can survive, they can make it in America? Many people lost their homes, their jobs. We must say, there is a way out, there is a better way. They cannot be shy because the convention is taking place in the Bank of America center. They’ve got to be strong. They’ve got to tell the truth.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know. I believe that the time is always right to do right, as Dr. King said, and people always have a right to protest for what is right.
I made the decision after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. I was with Robert Kennedy in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the evening of April 4, 1968, when I heard that Dr. King had been shot. I didn’t know his condition until Robert Kennedy spoke at a rally that I was having to organize and said that Dr. King had been assassinated.
I cried, with so many other people. And I said to myself, “We still have Bobby.” I went back to Atlanta, attended the funeral with Robert Kennedy and hundreds and thousands of others. After the funeral was over, I got back in the Kennedy campaign, went to Oregon and later to California. I campaigned for Bobby Kennedy with César Chávez. It was a wonderful effort. We went all over Los Angeles, going into wealthy neighborhoods, knocking on doors, urging people to vote for Bobby.
And that evening the primary was over, Bobby Kennedy came up to me and said, “John, I’m going downstairs to make my victory statement. Why don’t you remain?” I was in his suite with his sister, several other individuals, the brother of Medgar Evers. And we listened to Bobby, and he said, “On to Chicago.” And moments, minutes later, it was announced that he had been shot.
Dropped to the floor and cried and cried. I just wanted to get out of L.A. I got on a flight the next morning, flew to Atlanta, and I think I cried all the way from L.A. to Atlanta. And I came back to New York for the funeral. And before the funeral, I stood the night before as an honor guard with Reverend Ralph Abernathy. Then I rode the funeral train. The family asked me to ride with them from New York to Washington. And someplace along the way, I felt that somehow, in some way, I had to try to pick up where Dr. King and Robert Kennedy left off. These were my friends. These were my heroes. These were two young men that had inspired me. And some of my friends started encouraging me to get involved in electoral politics, do more than just register people, that I should run for office. And I made a decision years later to do it.
I think the death penalty is barbaric. It’s something that no civilized people should ever use. We don’t have a right to take another person’s life. We didn’t give it. It should be left to the Almighty, and not for a state, not for a government. On the federal level, we need to continue to speak up and speak out and put an end to the death penalty.
At the end of Across That Bridge, new book, write, “Just as Gandhi made it easier for King and King made it easier for Poland and Poland made it easier for Ireland and Ireland made it easier for Serbia and Serbia made it easier for the Arab Spring, and the Arab Spring made it easier for the protests in Wisconsin and Occupy…”
I believe there is something in human history—I call it the spirit of history. It’s like a spring, a stream, that continue to move. And individuals and forces come along that become symbols of what is good, what is right and what is fair. And that’s why I wrote this little book, to say to people that you, too, can allow yourself to be used by the spirit of history. Just find a way to get in the way. When I was growing up, my mother and father, my grandparents and great-grandparents were always telling me, “Don’t get in trouble. Don’t get in the way.” But I was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and others to get in the way, to get in trouble—good trouble, necessary trouble. And we all must find a way to have the courage to get in trouble, to do our part. Every generation must find a way to leave the planet, leave this little spaceship, earth, this little piece of real estate, a little better than we found it—a little cleaner, a little greener and a little more peaceful. I think that’s our calling. We have a mission, a mandate and a moral obligation to do just that.
____
John Lewis, 13-term Democratic congressman from Georgia. He was a leader of the civil rights movement, served as chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, helped organize the Freedom Rides, and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. He is author of the new book, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change.
— source democracynow.org, democracynow.org