Evelyn Reynolds

Snow was falling, lightly dusting the tables full of “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president” and “Fight for Trump” and other “Make America great again” regalia. Still, in subzero temperatures, people waited in a long and winding line on Saturday for a chance to see their greatest showman.Donald Trump, the former US president, was about to hold the biggest campaign rally yet in New Hampshire’s primary elections, where victory would put him within touching distance of the 2024 Republican nomination – and trigger renewed warnings that democracy itself will be on the ballot in November.But his ardent supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, saw things differently – 180 degrees differently. In their view it is Joe Biden who acts like an autocrat and Trump who is the saviour of the constitutional republic.The ex-president has long deployed strategy in which accusations against him are flipped and turned on the accuser. And the rally, and this election season so far, is proof that it’s working.“The funny thing is that everything the other side seems to accuse Trump of they’re guilty of themselves,” said Steve Baird, 52, a chief financial officer. “I feel more that Biden seems to be running the country like a dictator with all his executive orders and everything else.“Trump might be a billionaire but I feel more of a connection, that he’s more of a president for the people and that he’ll follow the constitution more than what the current establishment is doing.”During a presidential election debate in 2016, when Hillary Clinton called Trump a “puppet” of Russian president Vladimir Putin, he interjected: “No puppet. You’re the puppet.”Trump has perfected this twist of message over the years. In his inverted mirror, “fake news” refers not to online disinformation but a corrupt media ranged against Trump; the threat to democracy stems not from election lies but the weaponisation of the justice department; minority rule is less about gerrymandering than the radical left imposing big government, open borders and “woke” ideology.‘We’re living in dictatorship right now’There is no greater symbol of this reversal than the deadly January 6 insurrection, for which more than 1,200 people have been charged and nearly 900 have been convicted or pleaded guilty. Collectively they have been sentenced to more than 840 years in prison. Yet in Trump’s telling, they are “patriots” and, more recently, “hostages” whom he intends to pardon.Interviews in Manchester, where thousands of Trump supporters packed a sports arena in a show of force that spelled out the challenge facing primary rivals Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, demonstrated that this strategy, amplified by rightwing media, has soaked into the grassroots. If the 2024 election is a battle for democracy, they believe Trump is on the right side of history.Derek Levine, 52, a commercial airline pilot who served for 23 years in the air force, was wearing a “Trump: Save America again” cap. “Trump has already been a president once and he wasn’t a dictator then,” he said.“We’re seeing a dictator right now with weaponizing the FBI against conservative people, calling parents in Virginia who are concerned about what their kids are being taught domestic terrorists. That’s a dictator; not what Trump did.”Jenna Driquier, 31, a hairdresser, added: “We’re living in dictatorship right now. The high prices, trying to get to communism, it’s not what this country was founded on.”The struggle over perception is a struggle over language. As Biden and his allies frequently stress the need to protect democracy at home and abroad, Trump has co-opted the word, repeating it ad nauseam, draining it of meaning and establishing a false equivalence between a man who has served in Washington for half a century and one who attempted a coup.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAt Saturday’s rally, early in a speech lasting more than an hour-and-a-half, a giant screen above Trump’s head stated in stark black and white: “Biden attacks democracy.”The Republican frontrunner, wearing his customary dark suit, white shirt and red tie, said: “He is a threat to democracy. He really is. He’s a threat to democracy. We have to get him out. You know why he’s a threat to democracy? A couple of reasons but you know the first reason? He’s grossly incompetent.”Trump, facing 91 criminal charges, accused Biden of weaponising the justice department against him and railed against the president’s “protectors” in the “fake news” media.He did also pivot to attack Haley, seen as his strongest challenger in New Hampshire. Messages on the big screen included: “Nikki Haley is loved by Democrats, Wall Street & Globalists.” In a further piece of political theatre, Trump invited Governor Henry McMaster and other officials from South Carolina to assure him the state will vote in his favour, even though it is Haley’s home turf.Notably, he spent less time on Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who finished second in the Iowa caucuses but is polling weakly in New Hampshire. “You notice I haven’t mentioned the name of Ron DeSanctimonious yet,” he said “I think he’s gone.”Trump addressed a flippant remark that he made on Fox News vowing to be a dictator on “day one”, insisting that he had been unfairly edited. But some of his other comments left room for speculation about his authoritarian impulses.He argued that presidents should be immune from criminal prosecution once they have left office, a case his lawyers are attempting to make as he prepares to stand trial for election subversion. He said of the media: “These are sick people. We have to straighten out our free press.”He heaped praise on Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and casually observed: “It’s nice to have a strong man running your country.” And for good measure, in a bizarre closing riff accompanied by hypnotic music, he again referred to those imprisoned for their part in the January 6 riot as “hostages”.The crowd went home happy. More

Monday night: Des Moines, Iowa, celebrating victory with supporters over beer and popcorn. Tuesday morning: Manhattan, New York, on trial for defaming a woman he sexually abused. Tuesday night: Atkinson, New Hampshire, campaigning for the US presidency. Wednesday morning: court in New York again.Donald Trump, the former US president and frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024, has intertwined his political and legal calendars until they are all but indistinguishable. At rambunctious campaign rallies, he plays the victim and rails against a biased justice system. In sombre courtrooms, he creates a spectacle that guarantees airtime and fundraising to fuel his run for the White House.The jarring juxtaposition seems to be working.Trump’s 91 criminal charges across four cases did not stop him winning 98 out of 99 counties in Monday’s frigid Iowa caucuses, and interviews with his support base showed they accept his narrative of politically motivated prosecutions. He is leading opinion polls in New Hampshire and looks poised to become the Republican standard bearer.“The court appearances are his campaign,” Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “He’s spending much less time than the other candidates in the key states. He’s not spending as much on TV advertising. He’s doing all kinds of things that candidates for president usually don’t do because he’s got an ace card that none of the others have.“This has convinced not just his supporters but in a broad-based way the whole Republican party that he’s being oppressed, that Joe Biden is using the judicial system to try and put a stake in the heart of his toughest challenger for November. And they buy it.”Trump’s recent court appearances have been voluntary, not obligatory, at a time when his Republican rivals are crisscrossing states in search of votes. Last week the 77-year-old former reality TV star showed up for a hearing in Washington DC to hear his lawyers argue that he is immune from criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election. A day later he was in Des Moines, Iowa, for a Fox News town hall.The duelling schedule evidently did him no harm in Iowa, where he romped to victory over the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, by nearly 30 percentage points, more than twice the biggest winning margin ever achieved by a Republican. During his speech in Des Moines, Trump nodded to his legal tribulations: “I go to a lot of courthouses because of Biden, because they’re using that for election interference.”The following morning, he was in a Manhattan federal court – again by choice – to watch the selection of a jury that will decide whether he should pay damages for defamatory comments he made in office about the writer E Jean Carroll. Last year a jury concluded that Trump sexually abused her in a department store in 1996 and defamed her in 2022.That evening he headed to Atkinson, New Hampshire, for a campaign rally where he boasted about his win in Iowa but told supporters: “If I didn’t get indicted all these times and if they didn’t unfairly go after me, I would have won, but it would have been much closer. I tell you, I don’t know if I would have made the trade. I might have just liked the position we’re in right now.”Come Wednesday, it was back to New York and the Carroll case. This time Trump was animated, shaking his head at testimony he disliked, passing notes to his lawyers and speaking to them while jurors were in the room.He was scolded by Judge Lewis Kaplan after a lawyer for Carroll complained that he was grumbling about the case so loudly that jurors could hear him. When the judge threatened to expel him, Trump retorted: “I would love it.” The judge admonished: “I know you would. You just can’t control yourself in this circumstance, apparently.”Outside the courtroom, the Republican frontrunner then held a press conference, describing the trial as “rigged” and Carroll as “a person I never knew”. He complained that Kaplan, a Bill Clinton appointee, was “a nasty judge” and a “Trump-hating guy” who was “obviously not impartial”.Somehow he had made the case about himself rather than his victim. Maggie Haberman, author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, told CNN: “He showed up for her testimony and so instead of us talking about her testimony we are talking about the fact that he was making noises, he was overheard whispering to his lawyer.”She added: “He would have liked to have gotten thrown out because he would then claim he was a victim. It’s heads he wins, tails the other side loses.”Trump was not in court on Thursday so he could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral in Florida. He will soon head back to New Hampshire to hold rallies ahead of Tuesday’s primary election, where he could in effect seal the Republican nomination. As endorsements from senior Republicans pour in, it seems that the party has made a collective decision to carry the legal baggage of a man who now openly brags that he has been indicted more often than Al Capone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCharlie Sykes, editor of the Bulwark website and a former conservative radio host, said: “He’s going to have a courtroom campaign because Donald Trump relishes the idea of being the martyr. He thinks that being associated with these trials will actually help him in the polls and so far he’s not wrong. Every time he’s been indicted, he’s gone up.”But Sykes believes that Trump’s decision to attend the trial involving E Jean Carroll could be a mistake as he pivots to general election voters. “How many Americans actually know about this case? There’s been such a firehose of indictments, hearings, charges. Now Donald Trump himself has decided that he is going to draw attention to a case that he’s already lost, that has found him liable for sexual assault.“It’s hard for me to imagine any swing voters in the suburbs of Philadelphia or Milwaukee hearing for the first time about this case and thinking, yeah, this is the guy that I want to support for president.”Anna Greenberg, a senior partner at polling firm GQR, also sees limitations in Trump’s gameplan. She said: “He saw that when he got indicted he got a major boost, and you saw it in the primary polls, and so he may be thinking if I engage with these trials against me and I rail and I attack, that’s going to continue to give me some kind of benefit.“I think he already got the benefit. I don’t think there’s any additive benefit for him but I think there’s a real downside for him, which is that’s how he’s spending his time and not out on the campaign trail and doing the campaigning.”Trump has pleaded not guilty in four state and federal criminal cases, including two claiming he tried to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden. This week his lawyers filed paperwork in another case – over his allegedly illegal retention of sensitive classified documents – arguing that intelligence agencies were politically biased against Trump.Some observers fear that the scorched earth approach poses a far-reaching danger to civil society and American legal and political structures. Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, added: “Donald Trump is waging a concerted campaign to de-legitimize the justice system in America.“He is trying to discredit not just prosecutors, but also judges and juries and the entire process of legal accountability and the damage is going to be long lasting and it’s going to be profound.” More

Donald Trump says there would have been a ‘nuclear holocaust’ if he did not ‘deal’ with North Korea when he was president, in footage from his deposition last April and released this week by the New York State attorney general’s office. The former president called the fraud case against him ‘crazy’, insisting that banks ‘were fully paid’. Responding to a question about his 40 Wall Street office tower, across the street from the office of the attorney general, Letitia James, Trump insisted that somebody ‘open the curtain’ to look at the building More

Months before Donald Trump’s defiant turn as a witness at his New York civil fraud trial, the former president came face to face with the state attorney general who is suing him when he sat for a deposition last year at her Manhattan office.Video made public on Friday of the seven-hour, closed-door session last April shows the Republican presidential frontrunner’s demeanor going from calm and cool to indignant – at one point ripping into the lawsuit of the attorney general, Letitia James, against him as a “disgrace” and “a terrible thing”.Sitting with arms folded, an incredulous Trump complained to the state lawyer questioning him that he was being forced to “justify myself to you” after decades of success building a real estate empire that is now threatened by the court case.Trump, who contends James’s lawsuit is part of a politically motivated “witch-hunt”, was demonstrative from the outset. The video shows him smirking and pouting his lips as the attorney general, a Democrat, introduced herself and told him that she was “committed to a fair and impartial legal process”.James’s office released the video on Friday in response to requests from media outlets under New York’s Freedom of Information Law. Trump’s lawyers previously posted a transcript of his remarks to the trial docket in August.James’s lawsuit accuses Trump, his company and top executives of defrauding banks, insurers, and others by inflating his wealth and exaggerating the value of assets on annual financial statements used to secure loans and make deals.Judge Arthur Engoron, who will decide the case because a jury is not allowed in this type of lawsuit, has said he hopes to have a ruling by the end of January.Friday’s video is a rare chance for the public at large to see Trump as a witness.Cameras were not permitted in the courtroom when Trump testified on 6 November, nor were they allowed for closing arguments in the case on 11 January, when Trump defied the judge and gave a six-minute diatribe after his lawyers spoke.Here are the highlights from Trump’s videotaped deposition:‘You don’t have a case’Telling James and her staff, “you don’t have a case,” Trump insisted the banks she alleges were snookered with lofty valuations suffered no harm, got paid in his deals and “to this day have no complaints”.“Do you know the banks made a lot of money?” Trump asked, previewing his later trial testimony. “Do you know I don’t believe I ever got even a default notice and, even during Covid, the banks were all paid. And yet you’re suing on behalf of banks, I guess. It’s crazy. The whole case is crazy.”Don’t take my word for itTrump said he never felt his financial statements “would be taken very seriously”, and that people who did business with him were given ample warning not to trust them.Trump claimed the statements were mainly for his use, though he conceded financial institutions sometimes asked for them. Even then, he insisted it didn’t matter legally if they were accurate or not, because they came with a disclaimer.“I have a clause in there that says, ‘Don’t believe the statement. Go out and do your own work,’” Trump testified. “You’re supposed to pay no credence to what we say whatsoever.”‘Most important job in the world’After he was elected, Trump said, he was busy solving the world’s problems – like preventing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un from launching a nuclear attack.“I considered this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives,” Trump testified. “I think you would have nuclear holocaust if I didn’t deal with North Korea. I think you would have a nuclear war, if I weren’t elected. And I think you might have a nuclear war now, if you want to know the truth.”Obstructed viewIn one of his more animated moments, Trump urged his inquisitors to look right out the window for a view of his 40 Wall Street office tower – just across the street from James’s office where he testified.Asked how the building was doing, financially, Trump gestured toward the building with his thumb and answered: “Good. It’s right here. Would you like to see it?”“I don’t think we’re allowed to open the windows,” state lawyer Kevin Wallace said.“Open the curtain,” Trump suggested, bobbing his head around waiting for someone to oblige.“No,” Wallace said. More

When Rebecca Noecker first decided to enter politics in 2016, she was a young mom with two kids and many questions. She had a background in education but no knowledge of how to run for office.“There were so many systems that I saw around me that just felt broken and people were in pain and I wanted to do something about that,” Noecker, 39, said. “And it felt like politics was a way to do it.”She found a teacher in the only woman on her city council in St Paul, Minnesota.“She would walk around the lake with her constituents and called them ‘lake laps.’ I went on a lake lap with her, and I was just so struck by how authentic and genuine she was,” Noecker said of her mentor, former council member Amy Brendmoen.“She had three children and talked a lot about how despite the fact that you make sacrifices and you’re not necessarily home every night, your kids have this remarkable opportunity to see you in leadership and see what a difference you can make.”Today, Noecker, who represents the second ward, is St Paul’s longest serving member on the council. But she is far from the only woman.Last fall, all seven city council seats were up for grabs. On 7 November, after a campaign season packed with candidates, Minnesota’s capital city elected its new city council – comprised entirely of women. Last week marked the group’s inauguration.Noecker’s fellow council members – Nelsie Yang, Cheniqua Johnson, Hwa Jeong Kim, Saura Jost, Anika Bowie and Mitra Jalali – are all women of color and, like her, progressive in their politics. All council members are also below the age of 40.The diversity of the group is something newly elected council member Johnson, AGE, called “amazing and affirming”.“When you spend almost a year and a half working to earn your community’s trust during the cycle and vocalizing the community’s priority, you see – as the elections come in – that community heard you, they showed up and essentially, they want you to continue the work with them,” Johnson said. “It means voters elected who they wanted to see represent them. Many candidates ran and yet, our city said, ‘We want an all-woman city council.’”A 2023 Pew research report on women leaders in US politics found that women’s representation in politics continues to grow across all forms of government including the US senate, house of representatives, state legislatures and governors.In 2019, Nevada became the first state with a majority-women state legislature. Today, women make up 62% of the Nevada state legislature – the largest percentage of any state.But experts have noted that no major city has achieved the feat of electing an all-woman city council like St Paul.Notably, St Paul has a population of roughly 300,000 people, the second most populous city in the state after fellow Twin city, Minneapolis. Around 46% identify as a race other than white, according to the US census.Jalali was also reelected to the council and will now serve as its leader. Elected president in a unanimous vote, she said an all-woman city council should be considered normal.“St Paul voters are showing the world what’s possible on city councils, county boards and local and state government everywhere,” Jalali, 37, said. “This shouldn’t be an exceptional story, but a quiet normal that communities everywhere get to experience.”Jalali is the first Iranian-American to hold office in Minnesota and her resume includes experience teaching and working for fellow political pioneer, Keith Ellison, a former US house representative for Minnesota. He was the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African American representative from the state.“I’m excited to lead our council forward with our community’s voices at the table,” Jalali said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at Rutger University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), said women’s representation in US politics is generally trending upward.“If you look across levels of office, we’re seeing pretty steady gains,” she told the Guardian. “Although for many years they were incremental, but they were still upward.”In a CAWP study titled Rethinking women’s political power, 192 political actors were interviewed within five states – Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania – “to examine both the state of and change in women’s political power from 2010 to 2023”.Several barriers to women’s political representation were discovered: women’s unequal access to monied networks in campaign fundraising, low salaries for public service jobs and political party influence.“State-level and national mapping of existing organizations and programs shows that the support infrastructures for Democratic women in politics are more robust than those available to Republican women,” the report said. “This is true as well in our case states, where fewer gender-targeted resources are available to Republican women than their Democratic counterparts, even where Republicans hold statewide control.”While Dittmar pointed out that some of these barriers are easing, she said it’s also important to note that women are still underrepresented across different levels of office. It is uncommon for women to hold at least one third of offices at any level of government.“In the cases where we do see women make up either a majority, or in this case, all of a governing body, they are still very few and far between,” Dittmar said.Dittmar also credited, in part, societal changes that have allowed women to have a more noticeable presence in politics.“Beyond politics, there are [elements] that better situate women to run and win. Those are not only things on an individual level – where women have more access to positions of power across institutions, access to capital, and access to time outside the home due to a shift in expectations of gender roles – but also in the private and public spheres,” Dittmar said.“You’re seeing shifts in perceptions, both in the importance of having women in office, as well as women’s qualifications – things that historically have been more biased in ways that could really present significant hurdles to women. Voters may be more prone to think about the potential, value, and capacity for women to hold political positions.” More

There is rest for neither the wicked nor the warm undergarments among Republican presidential candidates this week, as the Republican primary rolls from a bone-bustingly cold Iowa to an almost-as-frigid New Hampshire.In Manchester, the state’s largest city, the temperature dropped to 10F (-12C) in the days before Tuesday’s primary election, cold enough for icicles to cling to cars, rooftops and, in a park near the center of town, a roundabout.But despite the snow piled high by the sides of roads, and the near constant need for a woolly hat, the remaining Republicans are set to spend the next few days making a last-minute pitch to voters.After a disappointing time in Iowa, where she placed third in the state’s caucuses, Nikki Haley is hoping the Granite state can hand her a boost, as she seeks to prevent what is threatening to become a Donald Trump march to the Republican nomination, and there are some signs that the former governor of South Carolina might just be in luck.In a state that takes an unusually aggressive pride in its independence – “Live free or die”, New Hampshire’s state motto, is the kind of thing a guy might scream before ripping off his shirt and initiating a bar fight – Republican voters at least appear to be considering someone other than their party’s de facto leader.Polls show Haley winning almost 34% of the vote in the state, 13 points behind Trump but riding a surge despite a disappointing performance in Iowa. Haley’s pitch of calm instead of the “chaos” of Trump, and her positioning of herself as a relative centrist, could prove appealing in New Hampshire.“The Iowa Republican party is dominated by conservative evangelical Christians, whose first, second and third concerns are cultural relations – they care about LGBTQ+ issues, they care about abortion, all that sort of stuff,” said Christopher Galdieri, a professor in the department of politics at Saint Anselm College.“Republicans here, there is a constituency for those sorts of issues, but a lot of Republicans here, particularly in what passes for the party’s establishment these days, their main concern is fiscal conservatism, low taxes, low regulation.”Haley, who in the American media’s telling has become the main threat to Trump, was scheduled to hold a slew of events in the coming days, including intimate gatherings in New Hampshire’s smaller towns, such as Keene and Exeter. But in Manchester, where looming red-brick buildings serve as a nod to its UK namesake, it is Trump who seems to have the largest presence, with signs heralding the former president prominent and his campaign headquarters a hub of activity.The former president traveled to New Hampshire on Friday after spending much of Thursday in court in New York, where a judge is deciding what damages he must pay to E Jean Carroll, who a jury found was sexually assaulted by Trump in 1995. The case appears to have distracted him, at least in the short term, from his efforts to win the presidency: Trump spent Thursday night posting more than 30 times on Truth Social, the rightwing social media network he formed after being banned from Twitter (now X) in 2020.Still, as the vote approaches, Trump is following a similar plan as the one he used in Iowa, swooping in to New Hampshire to hold bombastic rallies in venues his rivals could only dream of filling. The one-term former president was due to hold four rallies over the four days before the primary, including one at the 10,000-seat SNHU arena in Manchester.Trump addressed thousands of supporters at the same venue the night before the 2016 primary, memorably calling Ted Cruz, then one of his main rivals, a “pussy”. Trump had narrowly lost to Cruz in Iowa, but swept to victory in New Hampshire with a commanding 20-point victory that lit a fire under Trump’s campaign and propelled him to the Republican nomination.There are signs that things may be closer on Tuesday.In recent days Trump has complained about independent voters, who under state rules are able to vote in the Republican primary, potentially backing Haley, and has launched racist dog-whistle attacks against his opponent. He referred to Haley, whose parents emigrated to the US from India, as Nimrada, a butchering of her legal first name, Nimarata. Haley has gone by Nikki, her middle name, since she was born, a spokesperson said in 2021.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor her part, Haley is running a new ad in the state which links Trump with Joe Biden, claiming “both are consumed by chaos, negativity and grievances of the past”, and her relative calm seems to have some appeal.“I like her policies. I like what she did in South Carolina. I think she’s got good international experience, obviously, as a former UN ambassador,” said Jeanne Geisser at an event at a fancy hotel in Salem, a 20-minute drive from Manchester. She voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but said she would cast her ballot for Haley this time.“With Trump, all these lawsuits that are going on, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with those. And just his demeanor, his belittling of people. I don’t see that as presidential,” Geisser said.One person mostly absent from New Hampshire is Ron DeSantis, the cowboy boot-wearing Florida governor who came second to Trump in the Iowa caucuses. Though he beat Haley there, DeSantis is averaging 5% in New Hampshire polls, and though he held some events in the state on Friday, he has largely switched focus to South Carolina.While the focus is on the Republican primary, there are Democratic hopefuls active in New Hampshire too; Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, a self-help guru, are engaged in a largely futile battle to replace Joe Biden as the presidential nominee.Both Phillips and Williamson have both spent weeks criss-crossing the state, but New Hampshire will effectively have no say in the Democratic primary, after an internal party feud. The national Democratic party ditched decades of tradition this year in choosing South Carolina, a much more racially diverse state, to host the first presidential primary. When New Hampshire said it would host its primary first anyway, the Democratic National Committee essentially said it would ignore the results.That means most eyes will be concentrated on the Republican side of things next week, where Haley’s wealthy backers are demanding a good result.Ken Langone, the billionaire Home Depot co-founder and a key Haley donor, told the Financial Times on Thursday that he was prepared to spend “a nice sum of money” to support his candidate – but only if she does well in the Granite state.“If she doesn’t get traction in New Hampshire, you don’t throw money down a rathole,” Langone said. More

John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist More

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How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More