You must do something

John Lewis​ was at the heart of the protests in the early 1960s which transformed race relations in the United States. He participated in the sit-ins of 1960 in which black students (and a few white allies) occupied seats in shops, restaurants and entertainment venues from which African Americans were barred. In 1961 he joined the freedom rides, in which black and white activists travelled together on buses in the South to test whether local officials would follow new national rules prohibiting states from separating passengers on the basis of race. He was an early member of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC), which demanded the abolition of pigmentocracy through militant but non-violent direct action. He was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ address.

On many occasions, Lewis courted beatings and arrest in order to bring attention to the racial mistreatment that was pervasive in the Jim Crow South. In Selma, Alabama, on 7 March 1965, he led marchers who were asserting their right to vote in the face of the racist measures that had effectively disenfranchised them. They were met by a phalanx of state troopers, wearing gas masks and brandishing truncheons, who ordered the marchers to disperse. Lewis and his followers stood their ground. The violent response of the troopers – Lewis was beaten unconscious – was captured on film, provoking widespread revulsion and helping to generate the support needed to enact the most consequential federal legislation of the era, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After Bloody Sunday, Lewis entered into a rivalry that would change his life significantly. Stokely Carmichael, born in Trinidad, raised in New York and educated at Howard University, was a smart, charismatic and fearless activist who arrived in the South in the early 1960s to challenge the totems of white supremacy. Arrested for entering a ‘white’ station waiting room, he spent his 20th birthday at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary. Like Lewis, Carmichael venerated King, but by 1966 he was ready to abandon King’s pacifistic integrationism in favour of militant black nationalist rhetoric.

In May 1966, Lewis was initially re-elected as chair of SNCC. But after some members expressed dissatisfaction, another vote was taken in which Carmichael prevailed. This wasn’t altogether unexpected. Carmichael’s faction believed that Lewis was insufficiently attuned to the desire for black solidarity and assertiveness, and that he was wrongly attached to racial integration, excessively committed to non-violence and too willing to compromise. Their intention was to marginalise, if not expel, SNCC’s well-meaning white members, along with well-meaning ‘Negroes’ who were insufficiently ‘black’.

SNCC had been founded amid the exhilaration of the sit-ins by black college students impatient with the tactics of their elders in the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Although lawsuits, lobbying and petitions had yielded some positive results, the gains were too slow and too meagre for young people who had grown up believing in the ideals trumpeted by American leaders in the postwar period. Lewis and his peers wanted ‘Freedom Now!’ – freedom from the limitations imposed on their parents and freedom to share fully in the possibilities unleashed by American prosperity. They welcomed into their ranks white people who had somehow freed themselves from the racist ‘common sense’ in which they had been steeped for much of their lives.

But now the organisation which had given Lewis a sense of belonging and which he had been willing to defend and advance at the risk of his life, had rejected him. He soon resigned altogether. After that, morale at SNCC deteriorated. The tact, discipline and good manners that had characterised the organisation’s activism, winning it grudging admiration, degenerated into self-indulgence and sloganeering. Weeks after Lewis lost the vote, Carmichael electrified racial politics with a call and response routine in Greenwood, Mississippi in which he and his African American audience took turns in shouting ‘Black Power’. He thereby raised to new prominence a key term in American politics, one that inspired many blacks but exposed deep rifts within the movement. Like King, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young and other figures in the civil rights establishment, Lewis disliked the Black Power slogan. He feared it would bring them enemies and repel potential allies. More fundamentally, he doubted whether the ideology of Black Power could deliver the broad public support that would be needed if the huge impediments faced by African Americans were to be overcome.

Separating from SNCC marked Lewis for life. ‘It hurt to leave my family,’ he wrote in his memoir, Walking with the Wind (1998). ‘So many good brothers and sisters with whom I had shared so much … I felt abandoned, cast out.’ His exit was a harbinger of the organisation’s collapse. Six months after Carmichael’s coup, SNCC expelled its few remaining white members. The result, however, was not to increase black solidarity in the ranks. Instead, the racial cleansing intensified schisms among the remaining activists. Carmichael became a celebrity, derided by some as ‘Starmichael’ because of his vanity and hankering for publicity. He chaired the organisation for just a year before being succeeded by H. Rap Brown, a reckless provocateur. In 1968, Carmichael himself was expelled. By the early 1970s, SNCC had disappeared.

After Lewis left SNCC, he worked for various philanthropic and social justice organisations, and between 1970 and 1977 directed the Voter Education Project, which publicised itself with a poster proclaiming: ‘Hands That Pick Cotton Now Can Pick Our Elected Officials.’ Under Lewis’s leadership, VEP registered four million new black voters in the South. It wasn’t until 1981 that he entered electoral politics, winning a seat on the Atlanta City Council. Five years later, he ran against Julian Bond for the Democratic Party nomination for a seat in the US Congress representing a predominantly black district in and around Atlanta.

This was the second great political rivalry of Lewis’s life. He and Bond had been close friends, but in various ways were strikingly different. Lewis’s background was in the rural African American peasantry; Bond was from the black elite. Lewis’s parents hadn’t finished high school; Bond’s father had graduate degrees from the University of Chicago, had written several books, was the president of two colleges and knew W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Einstein. Lewis attended segregated schools then the American Baptist Theological Seminary; Bond went to the George School, a virtually all-white Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania, before returning to the South to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta. Lewis, for all his accomplishments, was shy and devoid of glamour; his speeches were impassioned, but as a public speaker he was laboured and awkward. Bond was confident, witty, sophisticated, debonair and well spoken. Lewis was homely; Bond was handsome.

Like Lewis, Bond had been a leading member of SNCC during its most productive phase, before 1966. His record wasn’t as conspicuously heroic as Lewis’s, but it was admirable enough, and he had been successful in overcoming efforts to exclude him from office. Elected in June 1965 to the Georgia House of Representatives, he was denied his seat for having supported SNCC’s denunciation of the Vietnam War: in the view of a majority of Georgia legislators, his anti-war stance meant he would be unable to swear in good faith that he would uphold the US constitution, a requirement of office. However, the Supreme Court, in Bond v. Floyd (1966), ruled unanimously to invalidate his exclusion, on the grounds that it unlawfully abridged his right to freedom of expression.

Going into the 1986 congressional election, Bond had twenty years’ experience in the Georgia state legislature, while Lewis had served several terms on the Atlanta City Council. Both were eager to act on a larger stage. At first it looked as if Bond would prevail. He won the primary, but Lewis got enough votes to force a run-off. As the race tightened, the candidates’ sparring turned ugly. There were rumours that Bond had been unfaithful to his wife, and that he had taken cocaine. The rumours were true, but hadn’t gained widespread public attention. For a while, an unspoken agreement stopped Bond and Lewis from making personal attacks on each other. But as the campaign wore on, electoral desperation took over. Bond reminded audiences that Lewis had previously said that, if re-elected to the city council, he wouldn’t run for Congress. Lewis publicly challenged Bond to take a drug test and derided him when he refused. Asked whether he was accusing Bond of using illegal drugs, Lewis responded: ‘I do not suspect that he is on drugs. I just feel like he should take the test to clear his name and remove public doubt. People need to know.’

Lewis prevailed. After his defeat, Bond wrote a syndicated column, appeared as a pundit on radio and television, hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live, played himself in a movie and taught history at the University of Virginia. Finally, in 1998, he became chairman of the NAACP. The two men never fully reconciled. When Bond died in 2015, Lewis was not invited to the funeral.

Raymond Arsenault​ and David Greenberg have written scholarly, capacious biographies of Lewis, both of which make significant contributions to the historiography of the civil rights movement and its legacies. Both synthesise the sizeable secondary literature and include recollections from Lewis’s relatives, friends, colleagues and employees. Both focus on Lewis’s public life; Greenberg occasionally glimpses behind the curtain, but neither book intrudes very far into Lewis’s private life or thoughts. Both obviously admire him. These books are first-rate hagiographies.

There is a price to be paid for such discretion. Some important questions are not pursued aggressively enough while others are not even posed. According to Greenberg’s account of the bitter 1986 election, Bond hinted that he had refrained from disclosing information about Lewis that would have been devastating for his campaign. What was that information? Due care should of course be taken, but a biographer must recognise that rumours are social facts whatever their accuracy and, if significant, are worthy of exploration.

Another aspect of the 1986 election glossed over by Greenberg and Arsenault is its racial demographics. Bond won the votes of about 6o per cent of the blacks who voted in the primary in this predominantly black district. He also had the support of the most prominent black Atlantans, including MLK’s widow, Coretta Scott King, and Andrew Young, then Atlanta’s mayor, who had been MLK’s confidant. Lewis won a large number of black votes in the run-off, but what put him over the top was white support. Why did white voters prefer Lewis? Greenberg notes that while Lewis was almost always humble and courteous, Bond was sometimes haughty, even arrogant. (Anyone getting the answering machine on his home phone would hear the message: ‘I’m sorry if there is no one here to answer your call, but that is the way it is … Please don’t leave a message on this phone. It does not like them and will not take them.’) But something more is needed to account for Lewis winning the white vote by four to one, especially since the policies of the rivals were so similar. One hypothesis is that whites felt more comfortable with Lewis precisely because of the attributes that blacks, especially those in the elite, disdained: the lack of sophistication in his spoken manner, the absence of uppityness. Was Lewis perceived by white voters as a ‘good Negro’, or at least as a less threatening one than Bond?

Both Arsenault and Greenberg devote many pages to Lewis’s work as a congressman. He sat in the House of Representatives for 34 years, winning re-election sixteen times, often unopposed. He was a committed liberal, a friend of organised labour and champion of a welfare system that would afford to all the minimal decencies of social life, including medical care. He opposed mass incarceration and the death penalty. When the occasion demanded, he recalled the activist instincts of his formative years: he staged a sit-in at the House of Representatives to protest against US immigration policy, and was arrested during protests outside the embassies of South Africa in the 1980s and Sudan in the 2000s. He supported gay rights, in contrast to many religiously inclined heroes of the civil rights movement (such as Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth) who resented gay activists’ comparison of their struggle to that of African Americans. His staunch support of Israel was in alignment with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, but set him against the likes of Bond and Jesse Jackson, who felt able to challenge pro-Israel politics without pandering to antisemitism.

Lewis’s response to the Million Man March in 1995 was in keeping with his characteristic posture. The march was organised by Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, a theocratic, black nationalist sect that exerted an influence out of all proportion to its numbers not least because of its famous recruits, who included Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Farrakhan invited African American men to Washington DC to commit themselves publicly to promoting black solidarity, undoing demeaning stereotypes and increasing political engagement within black communities. The pilgrimage would be addressed by speakers including Martin Luther King III, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou and Cornel West. Many black elected officials also participated, including the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, Donald M. Payne; the mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke; and the mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry. The name of the demonstration conveyed the organisers’ expectations as to turnout; in the event, the best estimate is that more than 800,000 people assembled in the Mall. Among them were many who did not share Farrakhan’s antisemitism and homophobia but felt compelled to attend (including a young Barack Obama). Pressure was put on Lewis to support or at least refrain from criticising the event, but in the end he declined to participate, saying that the rhetoric around the march cut against what he had worked for all his life: ‘tolerance, inclusion, integration’. Though he was an implacable foe of white supremacy, Lewis was also an unbending adversary of African American bigotries.

Lewis died aged eighty, of pancreatic cancer, in July 2020. He lay in state at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, from which he had led the protest on Bloody Sunday in 1965, then at the Alabama state capitol, the United States Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC and finally the Georgia state capitol. His funeral in Atlanta was attended by three former presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter sent his apologies – he was too old to travel. Donald Trump, the legitimacy of whose election win in 2016 Lewis had challenged, did not attend. Writing shortly before and in the knowledge of his imminent death, at a moment when it was unclear whether Joe Biden would overcome Trump in the upcoming election, Lewis issued his political credo for the last time: ‘When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.’