John Lewis passed away this weekend. It’s truly a sad day for this country – especially in light of the fact that the events of this year have shown how far the nation still has to go to achieve fairness and equality.
John Lewis was in the struggle from his youth.
When asked about the great March on Washington in 1963, John Lewis always mentioned Abraham Lincoln’s backside. He was 23 years old then, the chairman of the new Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He was two years distant from a stay in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman State Prison, the great, haunted place beneath a hundred blues songs, for the crime of using a white restroom. He was two years away from nearly being murdered by Alabama state troopers for the crime of wanting to vote. He was 23 and he was angry. The rhetoric John Lewis brought to Washington offered not peace, but a sword.
His speech was pretty harsh.
We won’t stop now. All of the forces of Eastland, Bamett, Wallace and Thurmond won’t stop this 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. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, WAKE UP AMERICA!
So much so, the older leaders asked him to tone the language down. And so he did.
When I think of Lewis I can’t help but admire how he stuck with the pursuit of the prize for all of his adult life. It had to be disheartening , especially in the 60’s and the 70’s. Now its 2020 and we still have people being attacked in the streets by overzealous police officers. But Lewis stayed on course over the years. He had to be frustrated. I know I am and its only been 4 years of this orange monster and about 20 years of watching my own country shamefully self destruct.
But Lewis persevered. I admire him for that.
He was the bravest man I ever met. Heroes in war, most of them, know that the country will embrace them when they come home. They have that to sustain them in the worst circumstances. They already know they have a country worth fighting for. When John Lewis was riding buses, and using forbidden washrooms, and walking across the bridge, he didn’t have that on which to rely. In that violent, freighted time, he was a man without a country. His courage came from a different place. It came not from being a man without a country, but from being a man demanding a country, and he wanted this one. It was the same fire that burned in the Founders, in the 54th Massachusetts on the beach before Battery Wagner, in the Tuskegee Airmen over Europe, and in the 183rd Engineers when they walked, horrified, into Buchenwald to liberate the survivors. It was the same fire that illuminated the Civil Rights Movement when he was young, and the new one that rose in the years before his death. It is the most American of desires to demand this country for your own, and to demand it fulfill the promises it made to the world. John Lewis had the most American soul I ever saw.
Providence being the great tragedian that it is, he died at a time when citizens are being rounded up on the street by anonymous elements of law-enforcement and hustled into unmarked vans. He died at a time when a desperate and failed president* is threatening to bring this kind of Bull Connor policing to every city in the country. He died at a time when the Voting Rights Act lies in ruins, and when Florida has found a clever way to bring back a poll tax. He died at a time of bad trouble, when the country is desperately in need of the “good trouble” he always recommended to his fellow citizens. He boycotted the inauguration of this president, a misbegotten shell of a man, because he saw all the old, howling ghosts who were lining up behind him, waiting for another turn at perverting the country John Lewis demanded with his own blood. He saw it all coming, right up to what’s happening at this very moment, from the peak in the middle of the bridge from which he first saw the lines of troopers, slapping the nightsticks into their palms. He got as far as his mighty American soul would carry him. It’s up to us to get ourselves the rest of the way.
Now comes the rude part. We are losing innocent people like Lewis every day in 2020. It does not have to be this way. The country could be and should be much better than it is. Lewis knew that.
But he persevered. So to honor his memory – we need to continue to fight back against the evil that is in the United States. We cannot let this descent into evil continue one day longer.