As 2019 drew to a close, U.S. Representative John Lewis of Georgia, released a brief statement that he had recently been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
“I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life,” added the 80-year old Congressman and Civil Rights icon, who’s now undergoing treatment near Washington, D.C.
The revelation triggered an outpouring of sympathy and support from across the nation, including a statement from ILWU International President Willie Adams, who said Lewis was “a part of our longshore family,” and praised him for being an “unfailing supporter of the rights and dignity of working Americans.”
ILWU connections
Lewis’ longstanding ILWU connections were forged over many decades because of a shared dedication to racial and economic justice, lifelong support for unions and workers, and the fact that his youngest sister, Rosa Tyner, was a member of ILWU Locals 10 and 91 for 23 years. As a young girl, Rosa recalled her oldest brother John coming home to visit the family and sharing stories about his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. Their mother, Willie Mae, would always urge John to “stay out of trouble,” to which the young man responded by promising to make only “good trouble.” Rosa moved back to Alabama after becoming a pensioner, while her brother John continues serving in Congress where he represents much of Atlanta Georgia in the House of Representatives.
Memoir of the Movement
The story of how Lewis and a group of brilliant, courageous young women and men emerged to lead one of the great social movements of the Twentieth Century is captured in his fine autobiography: Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. It begins with observations by the young boy who helped his family survive by raising chickens and picking cotton.
Born in 1940, Lewis and his fellow activists were raised at the end of the Great Depression and beginning of the Second World War. Some, including Lewis, had great-grandparents who passed along stories of “slavery times.”
Rural poverty
Lewis pulls no punches in describing the indignities and brutal oppression of racism that he witnessed while growing up, but notes that the poverty afflicted a majority of both whites and blacks around him. They were all burdened by debt and miserable pay that stemmed from the “tenant farming” system. He recalls that his mother and father once picked up to 400 pounds of cotton a day for a total of $1.40.
His parents continued working during his childhood, earning 50 cents a day for farm or domestic work. Lewis describes in great detail the backbreaking, miserable labor that he and others performed, explaining how it motivated him to attend school, which he did despite resistance from his parents who needed help in the fields.
Church lessons
Lewis was still a young boy when his parents nicknamed him “preacher,” because he delivered sermons and conducted funerals for chickens that died in the family coop. He attended church each Sunday with his family and kept a sharp eye on the injustices that surrounded him: chain gangs of black men who labored under armed guards, miserable schools, atrocious roads, public exclusions and filthy restrooms that were part of the Jim Crow system. “I was obsessed with learning all I could about the world beyond the one I knew,” explains Lewis, who visited the school library every day and devoured black newspapers and magazines that came from Chicago and other cities.
Key turning points
During his first year in the county’s only high school for black students, Lewis recalled reading a newspaper story about the Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education, which held that segregated schools were unconstitutional. The next year, in 1955, he heard a radio broadcast of the young Martin Luther King who was preaching from a church in Montgomery, 50 miles north of Troy. He said it “…felt as if King was “speaking directly to me…giving voice to everything I’d been feeling and fighting to figure out for years.” A few months later, tensions increased as Southern politicians openly defied the Supreme Court’s desegregation orders. By August, another shocking incident gripped Lewis and the nation when 14-year old Emmett Till was brutally murdered, causing a nationwide outrage.
Horror and a way forward
“I was shaken to the core by the killing of Emmett Till,” says Lewis, who admits he was also consumed with anger and rage for months after the murder. He became frustrated with the church and his own parents, who he wrongly believed to be weak for not speaking up. As 1955 drew to a close, Lewis witnessed the bus boycott unfold in Montgomery, 50 miles to the north, “an event that changed my life more than any other event before or since,” he said. The event was sparked by Rosa Parks, a domestic worker who received training in organizing skills at the Highlander Center in Kentucky.
During the year that followed, Lewis followed the bus boycott that he described as “riveting,” with 50,000 black residents of Montgomery refusing to ride on segregated buses. The 1956 protest was led by Martin Luther King, Jr., someone Lewis deeply admired for practicing the “social gospel” that connected bible teachings about justice with action against injustice in the real world. “More than ever I wanted to be a preacher too,” said Lewis.
First Sermon
His chance to preach came quickly, a few days before his sixteenth birthday in 1956, making a big impression on the congregation and elders who responded with shouts of “Amen” and “Praise the Lord.” Two days later, an uncle who was active in the NAACP and spent a decade campaigning for black voting rights was murdered by a white man who admitted to the killing but was never indicted. Lewis had his mindset on college but lacked the money and grades to attend Morehouse where King had graduated. His mother brought home a brochure for the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, which charged no tuition and offered work-study arrangements for all students, “and that was all I needed to know,” said Lewis. In a few weeks he was accepted and his life turned another corner.
Connections in Nashville
Lewis quickly connected with brilliant activists at his seminary and around Birmingham, as the city became a hotbed of organizing. James Lawson, who studied nonviolent action tactics in India, trained Lewis and other young activists in 1958, including Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry. Across his dorm hallway was the charismatic James Bevel, who was worldly, wise, and totally devoted to scripture – while also proclaiming his intention to become “a chicken-eating, liquor drinking, woman-chasing Baptist preacher.”
Sits-ins shock establishment
Lewis and other students organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville in 1959 and 1960. Their tactic soon spread to Greensboro, North Carolina and beyond.
Lewis quickly became a leading figure of the Nashville Movement – a student-driven effort based on Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance. He participated in another tactic known as the Freedom
Rides, first developed in the 1940’s and resurrected in 1960 by courageous students who were trained to desegregate buses and terminals in the face of brutal violence and bombings. These courageous nonviolent tactics embraced by Lewis, King and others were based on a broader strategy of winning public support and organizing political power to change the nation’s attitudes about racial injustice.
Leadership positions
Lewis had become a prominent student activist in the early 60’s and was elected to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1963 – winning him an opportunity to speak at the historic March on Washington that same year. Years of intensive work by SNCC in the south helped pave the way for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Meanwhile, more blood was being spilled.
The bridge
In one of his most famous and terrifying experiences, Lewis and Rev Josea Williams led a nonviolent march in 1965 across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, headed toward Montgomery. Organized by SNCC and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the pair led over 500 marchers into a line of violent racist police officers who attacked the group while Lewis urged everyone to kneel and pray. Lewis was severely beaten in the “Bloody Sunday” incident – one that some militants later cited as a reason to abandon nonviolent tactics.
More bitter experiences
Lewis and hundreds of activists spent years doing patient grassroots organizing in the South with Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and other unsung heroes of the movement. In 1964, these grassroots leaders were brushed aside by the political establishment at the Democratic Party Convention who seated pro-segregation delegates instead of an integrated group organized by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Conflict with militants
These and other setbacks triggered angry militants who grew impatient with nonviolent strategies to win majority support in the fight against racism, for civil rights and dignity. Lewis, who continued to advocate nonviolence, was removed as SNCC Chair in 1966, when black nationalists emerged, led by Stokely Carmichael who replaced Lewis.
Surviving the darkest days
Within two years of Lewis leaving SNCC, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April of 1968, while helping sanitation workers win a strike for justice. Robert Kennedy was assassinated the same year in June while campaigning for social and racial justice. Lewis and many political activists grew disheartened, but he never turned toward the violence and hyper-militancy that swept some others into political dead-ends.
Like a pilot light
Lewis, who has been arrested 40 times, says he views his contributions to the movement as a kind of “pilot light,” that can remain lit for the long haul. He contrasts his approach with a firecracker – that’s loud but leaves only ashes. His continuing belief in nonviolence and reconciliation to overcome race, religion and class conflicts, makes him a consistent voice for peaceful democratic reform.
Lewis was elected as the US Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district, a seat he won over fellow civil rights activist Julian Bond in 1986. He remains in that position today and holds several leadership positions.
Presidential Medal of Freedom
In 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Lewis with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. During the White House ceremony, Obama said: “There’s a quote inscribed over a doorway in Nashville, where students first refused to leave lunch counters 51 years ago this February. And the quote said, ‘If not us, then who? If not now, then when?’ It’s a question John Lewis has been asking his entire life. It’s what led him back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma after he had already been beaten within an inch of his life days before. It’s why, time and again, he faced down death so that all of us could share equally in the joys of life.
It’s why all these years later, he is known as the Conscience of the United States Congress, still speaking his mind on issues of justice and equality. And generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.”