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    ‘A vivid distillation of a deeply fractured country’: a history of the United States in nine photographs

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    The American photographer Peter van Agtmael experienced a life-changing moment, aged 19, when he happened on a copy of Magnum Degrees, a photobook published in 2000 of dramatic images from the previous decade.“I got an instantaneous education in the beauty, violence, mystery, complexity and simplicity of photography,” he writes in his afterword to Magnum America, a much bigger, more mysterious and complex compendium of photographs spanning nine decades, from postwar 1940s to the present day.Magnum was formed as a cooperative by a group of renowned war photographers, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1947. It’s cooperative nature was initially a reflection of its founders’ stoical postwar optimism in the face of the horrors and traumas they had witnessed, but also their shared spirit of creative independence.Magnum America traces the nation’s often turbulent journey from those tentatively optimistic postwar years to the existential anxiety of the present political moment in which democracy itself hangs in the balance. Though punctuated by celebrated portraits and observational series on ordinary American lives, it is the hard-hitting photojournalism that arrests, from Capa’s blurred but powerful images from the D-day landing at Omaha beach to Van Agtmael’s eye-of-the-storm reportage of the siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021.Van Agtmael and his fellow editor, the curator and feminist academic Laura Wexler, have not attempted to create a definitive visual history of the United States as reflexed through the lenses of Magnum photographers, but instead deftly explore ideas of history, culture, myth and national identity. The book comprises 600 images – some famous, some relatively unknown – culled from a total of 227,450. The selection here reflects that mix, but concentrates on images of conflict and political drama that are pertinent to today’s fraught pre-election moment.The book is also a revealing social history of Magnum itself: the ideal and the often problematic reality. For too long, it reflected the predominantly white, male world of photojournalism, the exceptions being pioneers such as Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Inge Morath and, later, Susan Meiselas. And, though Magnum photographers made some of the most memorable images of the black civil rights struggle in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that Eli Reed became the first black photographer to enter the Magnum fold. That irony went unnoticed for a long time. Today, Magnum is a diverse organisation, but it is its relevance – and, by extension, photojournalism’s role – that is also at stake in a world of relentless image-making and instant image-dissemination, an environment unimaginable to its founders. The ongoing carnage in Gaza enters our consciousness daily on social media, where local photojournalists as well as ordinary people with mobile phones bear witness at great risk in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Not one photojournalist from Magnum or any other western photo agency has reported from Gaza because of Israel’s refusal to admit even embedded members of the international media. The integral act of bearing witness, which is at the core of Magnum’s collective being, continues just as powerfully all the same. The next big volume of retrospective Magnum images may have to find a way of grappling with that dilemma.1940s: Robert CapaAmerican troops landing on Omaha beach, D-day, Normandy, France, 6 June 1944View image in fullscreenOn 6 June 1944, Robert Capa was one of a handful of photographers granted permission to cross the English Channel with allied forces during the D-day operation to liberate occupied France. He travelled with American soldiers from E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment. This blurred but evocative image was taken in the immediate wake of their arrival at Omaha beach, where they were met with cannon and small arms fire from embedded German troops as they leapt off their landing crafts into cold, choppy waters. It remains one of the most visceral images of that pivotal, but at times chaotic, operation, during which about 4,440 allied soldiers lost their lives and close to 6,000 were wounded.Intriguingly, the circumstances in which the 11 images that comprise Capa’s reportage from Omaha beach were created – which he described in characteristically self-mythologising fashion in his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus – have recently been contested. Likewise his contention that they were all that remained of 106 pictures he sent to Life magazine on his return to England, the rest having been mysteriously destroyed after being left too long at a high temperature by an unfortunate lab assistant who was processing them.Whatever the truth, the photographs that were taken under extreme duress during his relatively short time on the beach – he made it on to a departing boat after a severe panic attack in which his hands were shaking so badly he could not reload his camera – are a powerful and up-close record of that day’s tumultuous events. There have been several attempts to identify the “soldier in the surf”, with Private Huston “Hu” Sears Riley the most likely contender. That he has not been definitively identified lends another level of poignancy to the image.Capa, one of Magnum’s founders, was arguably the most revered photojournalist of the 20th century. His most famous quote epitomised his cavalier approach: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In 1954, 10 years after this photograph was taken, he was killed, aged 40, by a landmine in Vietnam, while covering the first Indochina war.1950s: Elliott ErwittWilmington, North Carolina, 1950View image in fullscreenElliott Erwitt was invited to join Magnum by Robert Capa in 1953. Having studied photography and film-making at college in California, Erwitt, aged 25, had already made a name for himself as an editorial photographer for various commercial magazines. He would go on to become one of the world’s most famous image-makers, best known for his striking, slightly surreal pictures of the everyday. His similarly offbeat portraits of dogs have been the subject of five photobooks to date. It is fair to say that Erwitt’s dedication to being, as he put it, “serious about not being serious” has tended to shift attention away from his more unsettlingly powerful images. One of the most rawly observant is his photograph of a grief stricken and bewildered Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s funeral.His photograph Wilmington, North Carolina, 1950 possesses a resonance that is at odds with its neutral geographical title. Like many images in Magnum America, it captures a significant moment, simultaneously evoking the darkness of the US’s past and signalling a turbulent future of hard-won progress. The tentative beginning of the civil rights movement was still four years away when this picture was taken, and it was 14 years before that struggle achieved one of its seminal victories when the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 outlawed segregation. The separate drinking fountains, marked “White” and “Colored”, the one modern and sleekly designed, the other makeshift and worn, speak of a time not that distant when discrimination was a given in certain states. The face of the man crouching over the sink beneath the Colored sign is blurred, and his stance suggests he is looking towards the other fountain that is so close yet out of bounds. As a signifier of the postwar era of US segregation in the south, Erwitt’s grainy image remains starkly affecting and deeply symbolic.1960s: Paul FuscoRobert Kennedy funeral train, USA, 1968View image in fullscreenIt was a year of sustained social and political turbulence in the US, the war in Vietnam dividing the country across generational lines and provoking widespread protests that often culminated in violence. The conflict on the streets reached a climax of sorts at the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, when police brutally attacked activists and bystanders, the violence captured on TV cameras and broadcast nationally on news reports.By then, the already divided nation had been traumatised by the recent assassinations of two progressive leaders: the black civil rights figurehead Martin Luther King Jr and the Democratic presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy. Paul Fusco boarded the train taking Kennedy’s body from New York to Washington focused on how he would cover the senator’s state funeral at Arlington cemetery for Look magazine. When the train emerged from a long dark Manhattan tunnel into daylight, he was taken aback by what he saw. Ordinary citizens, young and old, had gathered in clusters by the railway track, standing in silent homage to the young politician whose death, like his life, had echoed that of his older, more famous brother, President John F Kennedy.The train moved slowly, perhaps out of respect for the dead senator, taking eight hours rather than the usual four to complete its journey. Along the entirety of the route, people congregated trackside in their summer clothes. Fusco shot about 2,000 photos en route to Washington. In them, he freeze-framed for posterity a nation in mourning: families and friends holding hands, men standing to attention to salute, a woman kneeling in prayer. Mostly, though, a seemingly endless succession of ordinary Americans of every race, creed and colour gaze upwards as the train trundles past from city to suburb and on through sun-dappled rural neighbourhoods, their collective silence palpable in every frame.At the time, the editors of Look bafflingly decided not to publish any of Fusco’s extraordinary funeral train series. After the magazine ceased publication in 1971, they remained unseen for another 30 years, consigned to the vast archive of the Library of Congress until they were uncovered by a Magnum researcher. Almost six decades on, they evoke another now distant US, one united in grief but also, as Fusco later put it, “grateful for the commitment and hope Bobby nurtured in the legions of the poor, the black and countless other forgotten Americans”.1970s: Alex WebbNixon resignation, Washington DC, 1974View image in fullscreenOn 8 August 1974, at 9pm, Richard Nixon, who was facing impeachment and removal from office for his role in the Watergate scandal, announced that he was resigning as president of America. He was the first and as yet only US head of state to do so. “As president,” he told the country in a live television broadcast from the White House, “I must put the interests of America first.”The evidence of his misdemeanours, as uncovered by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with the help of an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat”, suggested that sentiment had not been foremost in his mind two years earlier, when a break-in had occurred at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington DC. It had been carried out by a group devoted to Nixon’s re-election, which included his former close associate G Gordon Liddy. Along with six others, Liddy was subsequently jailed for his part in the burglary.Woodward and Bernstein’s exhaustive investigation also uncovered evidence of wiretaps of the phones of those Nixon considered his most dangerous enemies. The break-in and cover-up was exposed in detail in the televised Watergate hearings that by turns enthralled and appalled the US public over 51 days in 1973.That Nixon hung on in office as long as he did was testament to his tenacity as well as his sense of entitlement. Tricky Dicky, as he came to be known, escaped the humiliation of impeachment and a possible prison sentence and was subsequently pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.When the news of his resignation broke, Alex Webb evoked the country’s collective response in his image of a single, anonymous individual intensely perusing the Washington Post on the streets of the capital. The front page headline, “Nixon Resigns”, resonates across the years, through the subsequent impeachments of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as the turbulence of the latter’s first term of office, the incendiary nature of his departure from it, and the possibility of his imminent return. “It changed history,” Woodward recently said of the crimes he helped to uncover. “It was a red light for presidents.” We may find out soon enough if that is still the case.1980s: Susan MeiselasUS/Mexican border, 8am: undocumented workers discovered in a “drop off” site, Interstate 5, Oceanside, California, 1989View image in fullscreenThroughout his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised his faithful that he would construct “a big beautiful wall” between the US and Mexico, one that stretched across its 2,000-mile length, thus ending once and for all the flow of illegal migrants that, he claimed, threatened the security and identity of the US. The construction of a border wall was already well under way long before Trump began his campaign, with more than 600 miles of the southern border barricaded and protected by immigration authorities. It signified the strategy of deterrence through military-style policing that had been officially sanctioned by President Clinton in 1995.This photograph by Susan Meiselas was taken in 1989, when the border was more porous and economic migrants regularly made the crossing, mainly to do the myriad low-paid menial jobs that helped keep the American, and in particular the Californian, economy afloat. By then, Meiselas had made her name with her documentary reportage from the long civil war in El Salvador and the Nicaraguan revolution.For her series Crossings, she worked with the migrants and the border security patrols tasked with apprehending them. Many of those sent back to their homeland would try to enter again by different routes, such was their dedication to the dream of reinventing themselves in the US. This image dramatically evokes the precariousness of the immigrant journey by capturing the moment some undocumented workers are discovered by a border patrol officer at the drop-off site they’ve been left at by smugglers after crossing the border. “When people are coming across the border, they are giving up on their homeland,” she said later of this photo and others like it. “That’s a very hard thing to do. There’s an uncertainty; maybe it’s that uncertainty that you are seeing.”1990s: Eli ReedMembers of the Nation of Islam among the ruins of the Rodney King riots, Los Angeles, California, 1992View image in fullscreenThe Magnum archive is rich in memorable images of the struggle – and solidarity – of African American activists during the civil rights era by the likes of Leonard Freed, Burt Glinn, Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon. It wasn’t until 1988, 41 years after the agency’s formation, that Eli Reed became the first black member of the organisation. “By signing him on, the agency granted loftiness to its existence,” Gordon Parks would later attest. Four decades earlier, in 1948, he had made a similar breakthrough when he became Life magazine’s first black staff photographer.From the moment he took up a camera as a young man, Reed’s ambition has been to capture the full range of black people’s experience, from the everyday to the politically seismic, the intimately tender to the collectively traumatic. To this end, his book Black in America, published in 1997, is punctuated throughout with moments of tentative optimism but also tempered by a deep anger and frustration that Reed, an activist with a camera, shared with many of his subjects.This striking image was made in the immediate aftermath of the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of four LAPD officers who had been captured on camera a year earlier brutally beating a young black man, Rodney King. It features three besuited members of the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist organisation that believes in the formation of a separate state for African Americans within the US. Despite their extremist views, they are regarded by some in the black community as role models who uphold the traditional values of discipline and self-respect, while espousing self-determination as the only alternative to endemic racism.Here, the three young men stand, alert and yet seemingly unconcerned by the proximity of Reed’s camera, in front of the ruins of a building destroyed in the riots. The stark contrast between their aura of calm authority and the wreckage that signifies chaos and disorder lends the image an edgy complexity. One of the underlying questions posed by Reed’s immersive reportage is how the black community should respond to often murderous police brutality. It has been answered in frequently dramatic fashion in the decades since, most resoundingly in the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which became a global phenomenon after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.2000s: Thomas HoepkerYoung people during lunch break in Brooklyn with the twin towers burning across the river, 11 September 2001View image in fullscreenThe terrorist attack on the twin towers in lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001 was captured by several Magnum photographers, and their images of the cataclysm and its aftermath were published in a large-format book, New York September 11, less than two months after the event. The exception was Thomas Hoepker’s complex and, for some, provocative portrait of a group of young people gathered by the river’s edge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, while a dense plume of grey smoke billows from the familiar skyline in the middle distance. The image so disoriented its creator that he chose not to include it in the book, waiting until 2006, the fifth anniversary of the attack, before publishing it.Hoepker’s initial anxiety, it turned out, was justified. After its belated publication, Hoepker wrote a short article in response to a column in the New York Times that decried his “shocking” photograph and suggested that the five young people in it were relaxing, having already started to “move on” from the shock and horror of the attack. Hoepker admitted that he had initially found the image “ambiguous and confusing”, and had swiftly come to the conclusion that publishing it so close to the actual event “might distort the reality as we had felt it on that historic day”.This, in turn, prompted one of the people in the photograph, Walter Sipser, to respond, accusing both Hoepker and the NYT columnist of distorting his reality. He pointed out that the three people chatting to him and his girlfriend were passing strangers, the group having found themselves “suddenly bound together… in the aftermath of a catastrophe”. Rather than feeling relaxed, they were, he explained, united “in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day”. A scene that had initially appeared “ambiguous and confusing” to the photographer felt cynically manipulative to the subjects, for whom it is a stolen and distorted moment in which nothing but the unimaginable horror unfolding in the background is what it seems. Here, the idea of bearing witness that has traditionally underpinned photojournalism in general, and Magnum in particular, seems to collapse in on itself.2010s: Alec SothLockdown drill, Belle Plaine high school, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2014View image in fullscreenSchool shootings are a particularly American phenomenon, the deadliest of which have imprinted the names of their locations – Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech – on our collective consciousness. According to a recent CNN report, there were at least 58 shootings on US school grounds and collage campuses between January and mid-October of this year, resulting in 28 deaths and more than 72 injuries.Alec Soth’s dramatic photograph was taken during a school lockdown drill that had interrupted an eight-grade gym class at Belle Plaine high school in his home town, Minneapolis. These kinds of drills are compulsory in more than 20 states. That they are now such a common feature in US schools, that they have become almost normalised, speaks volumes about US gun culture and the failure of legislation to control it. Kenneth Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, told the New York Times: “The majority of today’s generation of students and school staff view lockdowns as a routine part of the school culture, just as we have viewed fire drills for many years.”Soth’s deftly composed photograph is startling in its stillness and atmosphere of vulnerability. The young girls huddled together, faces hidden in hands, heads bowed in silent thought. Their pale limbs are in dramatic contrast to the deep red of their school T-shirts and the shiny gym lockers. The drama here lies in the dread possibility of what might one day come to pass, and one cannot help but ponder where the schoolgirls’ thoughts have wandered in this silent, confined space. It is an image neither violent nor transgressive but that disturbs all the same in its evocation of a singular kind of collective cognitive dissonance.2020s: Peter van AgtmaelStorming of the Capitol, Washington DC, 6 January 2021View image in fullscreenThe tumultuous events of 6 January 2021, when a riotous mob stormed the Capitol building after an inflammatory speech by Donald Trump, hang like a storm cloud over the imminent US election. As the election results pivoted towards a Democrat victory, Trump had urged his followers to converge on the Capitol to “stop the steal”. Many thousands responded, fighting their way into the Capitol building where they ransacked offices, smashed furniture and wandered the corridors in search of the politicians that Trump had demonised. Chief among them were Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Mike Pence, his presidential running mate, who had refused to challenge the result. Both were perilously close to the rioters inside the building before they were safely evacuated.Peter van Agtmael, whose photojournalism over the past few decades has interrogated the US’s foreign wars and its concurrent domestic discontents was in the midst of the mob at Capitol Hill on the day. From the eye of the hurricane, he captured protesters clashing violently with outnumbered police armed with batons and pepper spray. This image distills the greater scattered disorder that erupted around the Capitol building and the dogged determination of the protesters, one of whom has scaled a high wall, his hand clinging to a marble ledge as he bends to help others beneath him. Only his baseball cap is visible and beyond it a panoramic of the unruly horde spread out across the grounds, many of them carrying US flags.In the background, the tall Washington Monument, built in honour of the first US president, points towards the sky, a symbol of the birth of US democracy. Beneath it, all is chaos and disorder. Van Agtmael’s dramatic image is a vivid distillation of a deeply fractured US. It may also be an augury of more turbulent times to come.

    Magnum America by Peter van Agtmael and Laura Wexler is published by Thames & Hudson (£125). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Ruby Bridges: civil rights pioneer rejects claim book makes white children uncomfortable

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      Increasingly, the US civil rights icon Ruby Bridges – the first Black child to integrate a school in Louisiana – has seen some adults seek to prevent grade-school students from accessing the books and films that chronicle her story, saying the tale makes white children feel bad about themselves.But that justification is “ridiculous” because “my biggest fans are kids all around the world”, Bridges told NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker in an interview airing on Sunday morning’s episode of the show.“All of the letters, all of the mail, I have little girls from all walks of life, different nationalities that dress up like Ruby Bridges,” the now 69-year-old activist said in an excerpt of the interview that NBC shared in advance with the Guardian.“I found through … traveling that they resonate with the loneliness, probably the pain that I felt. There’s all sorts of reasons that they are drawn to my story. So I would have to disagree [that it makes certain children feel guilty].”Delivered in a recurring segment known as Meet the Moment, which aims to spotlight people who influence political issues outside Washington, Bridges’ remarks to Welker come a little more than a year after one parent’s complaint prompted a school in Florida to stop showing its students a 1988 made-for-TV movie about her.The parent in question complained that the movie – which some schools usually show to students during Black History Month in February – might teach children that “white people hate Black people”.Separately, Bridges’ autobiographical picture book I Am Ruby Bridges was included in a collection of 64 “diverse” titles from Scholastic Books – the US’s largest children’s book publisher – that librarians are allowed to opt out of for popular book fairs that Scholastic helps stage at campuses nationwide.Scholastic defended itself by saying it had been forced into that position to shield teachers and librarians in largely conservative regions which may have enacted prohibitions against children’s books addressing race, gender and sexuality.Other works by Bridges have also been targeted by book bans schemed up by groups such as Moms for Liberty.In her conversation with Welker, Bridges dismissed the idea that her experience could unduly make white children uncomfortable.“That’s just an excuse not to share the truth, to cover up history,” Bridges said. “But I believe that history is sacred – that none of us should have the right to change or alter history in any way.”Bridges was six years old in November 1960 when US deputy marshals escorted her past jeering crowds into New Orleans’ William Frantz elementary school.With her white sweater, matching hair bow, black patent leather shoes and a small satchel in her right hand that day, she became the first Black child to desegregate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans – a scene immortalized in the 1963 Norman Rockwell painting named The Problem We All Live With.Bridges grew up to start an eponymous foundation dedicated to promoting tolerance and change through academic education. Meanwhile, the Akili Academy now occupying the school which Bridges integrated has a majority Black student population and is a stop on Louisiana’s Civil Rights Trail. More

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      in US Politics

      Solidarity and strategy: the forgotten lessons of truly effective protest

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      ‘Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers,” the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote in his 1777 essay Of the First Principles of Government. Centuries later, his observation still holds. Despite having numbers on our side, the vast majority of people continue to be dominated by a small subset of the population. Why?Today, an oligarchic minority rules because they have extreme wealth. The 2022 World Inequality Report found that the richest 10% today take over 52% of all income, leaving the poorest half just 8.5%. The same year, the bottom half of US citizens, or more than 160 million people, held a mere 2% of the country’s total wealth. An upper class owns most of the land and capital, which allows them, in turn, to exert control over politics and pass on enormous fortunes to their offspring, effectively establishing a modern-day aristocracy.In opposition to the power of money stands the power of the many – at least in theory. In practice, things are more complicated. As Hume noted long ago, power does not flow from sheer numbers alone. What matters is not merely absolute numbers but organised numbers. Without solidarity and organisation, numerical advantage doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t matter if there are thousands of workers and only a handful of bosses if those workers lack a union, or if there are millions of citizens and one dictator if people are too atomised and afraid to try to topple the regime.Yet history has shown time and again that even a proportionally small number of people, if they are well organised, can have an outsized effect. People getting organised is what brought down slavery and Jim Crow, outlawed child labour in the US and elsewhere, and overthrew the legal subjugation of women. If it wasn’t for people acting in concert, universal suffrage would not exist, and neither would the eight-hour workday or the weekend. There would be no entitlement to basic wages, unemployment insurance, or social services, including public education. It would still be a crime to be gay or trans. Women would still be under the thumb of their husbands and at the mercy of sexist employers, and abortion would never have been legalised, however tenuously. Disabled people would lack basic civil rights. The environment would be totally unprotected and even more polluted. Without collective action, colonised people would never have ousted their oppressors, Indigenous people would not have survived attacks from genocidal settlers, and apartheid would not have been overthrown.Often, the powerful like to take credit for social change after the fact, portraying progress as the inevitable result of economic development and enlightened, beneficent leadership. We praise President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for forging the New Deal, with its wealth of social programmes and labour protections, instead of paying tribute to the militant labour movement that forced his administration’s hand, inflicting real costs on bosses and investors through thousands of work stoppages, picket lines and strikes. Similarly, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not come about because of Lyndon B Johnson’s bravery, but rather because a militant and well-organised minority fought boldly against a hostile and often violent majority, pushing them to shift their behaviours, if not their beliefs.Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the labour movement and the civil rights movement had a complex relationship, but ultimately collaboration strengthened them both. The 1963 March on Washington was a march for “jobs and freedom”, and many of the signs held aloft during that historic gathering bore the stamp of the trade unions that helped fund the event and provided critical logistical support. In the decades that followed, there was a steep decline in the membership bases of unions and civic associations, as the right wing began a concerted campaign to undermine their legal ability to organise.Scholars have since documented the way the late 20th century was, for the activist left, characterised by a shift to a shallow, professional and often philanthropically funded model of “advocacy”, one that elevates self-appointed leaders and elite experts to speak on behalf of constituencies to whom they are not directly accountable. Rather than organising people to fight for themselves, these groups promote professionals who attempt to exert influence inside the halls of power. Instead of protests, they publish white papers; in place of strikes, they circulate statements; instead of cultivating solidarity, they seek access to decision-makers.These kinds of elite strategies can occasionally produce positive results, but the approach is often counterproductive, and certainly not democratic. This top-down approach puts its faith in the persuasive abilities of a tiny few, and denies the fact that politics is a power struggle – and that engaging and organising more people gives your position more leverage.The sociologist Theda Skocpol uses the phrase “diminished democracy” to describe this shift from membership to management-led initiatives. A similar trend of diminishing democracy is apparent in the growing number of people who think of themselves as allies or activists, but who are not connected to political organisations. Millions of concerned citizens support social justice causes – they want an end to racism, a shift toward ecological sustainability, better treatment for workers, and so on – and they raise awareness by sharing on social media, committing random acts of kindness, voting for progressive candidates and showing up at rallies. And yet, they are not actually organised.The diminished organisational capacity in American civic life is reflected in the weakness of social movements that appear, on the surface, to be robust. The 21st century has witnessed the biggest protests, and the most popular petitions, in history, yet they have produced comparatively small effects. On 15 February 2003, across the world, an estimated 10 million people came out in opposition to the impending war in Iraq. Since then, in the US, protests have only become bigger. In 2017, the Women’s March, held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, attracted an estimated 5 million people, taking part in at least 400 actions worldwide, from large cities to small towns. In the autumn of 2019, teenagers called for a global climate strike, which inspired more than 6 million people to protest at 4,500 locations in 150 countries. In 2020, the protests against racism and police brutality continued the trend, rapidly becoming the largest movement in the country’s history. After the murder of George Floyd, an estimated 15 to 26 million people demonstrated nationwide over a one-month period.Of course, there is much to cheer about here, especially when people move from the sidelines to the streets. During the anti-police brutality protests of 2020, half of those who protested reported that it was their first time ever doing so.View image in fullscreenBut we’ve seen again and again that size alone doesn’t guarantee success. President George W Bush dismissed the anti-war actions as a “focus group”, and barrelled ahead with an illegal war that would cost more than 1 million lives; protesters never unleashed the kind of sustained resistance that played a role in ending the war in Vietnam. The Women’s March protests were meaningful and inspiring to the participants, and offered a vital outlet for dissent that fed the electoral energy that deposed Donald Trump, but failed to deeply shift policy or the patriarchal status quo. The youth leaders of the global climate strike hoped for something more confrontational – teenage organiser implored adult allies to walk off the job and escalate the fight – but the few grownups who skipped work didn’t do so in a coordinated fashion. If the adults had organised as the teenagers did and halted business as usual around the world, more might have come of it. The racial justice protests of 2020 were historic and changed the terms of the national debate, and many local groups and electoral campaigns harnessed the movement’s momentum to important effect – but the scale of these victories hardly matches the massive outcry and depth of public support the numbers in the streets indicate. What might have happened had a larger fraction of the tens of millions who demonstrated been channelled into member-based organisations to work toward common goals?Elsewhere in the world we see a similar problem. The protests of the Arab spring brought out huge numbers of people across the Middle East, from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain and Syria. The numbers sparked significant political consequences in some cases, but the lack of organisation around clear alternatives meant that the results were not necessarily improvements. Syria devolved into a devastating and protracted civil war; Egypt saw its authoritarian leader resign, only to eventually be replaced by a military dictatorship; Tunisia was the lone nation in the region that adopted democracy, but a decade after the 2011 protests, its president was already reconsolidating power, expanding his executive powers, and diminishing checks and balances, undermining the reforms that the revolution initiated.Uprisings can sometimes create a mirage of popular power, but without the organisation, strategy and vision necessary to influence what follows, the presence of large numbers is insufficient to produce transformative results, leaving more disciplined and mercenary formations to fill the void.It’s worth lingering on this dilemma, because it is tempting to think that the problem is that our movements aren’t big enough. This is where the question of organisation comes in. It’s not enough to pursue numbers alone. If material transformation is your goal, it may well be better to have a dozen staunch supporters than 1,000 fair-weather friends; 100 dedicated organisers will probably accomplish more than 100,000 email contacts or retweets.Consider what it took to compose and deliver a petition two centuries ago. In 1839, the London Working Men’s Association presented a People’s Charter to the British parliament, demanding electoral reforms including universal male suffrage and annual elections. They gathered more than 1,280,000 names, representing workers of every imaginable occupation and background, on a massive scroll that was three miles long. Simply transporting it across town was a feat that demonstrated the dedication and ingenuity of the ringleaders, and the depth of popular support. When the petition was rejected by parliament, public outcry inspired organisers to try again. They presented a second charter in May 1842, signed by more than 3 million people, which was also ignored, and then a third petition delivered in 1848. Today, the UK parliament’s official website recounts this history, noting that while the Chartist movement formally disbanded before it succeeded, it helped catalyse change, including the electoral reform bills of 1867 and 1884, and that by 1918 “five of the Chartists’ six demands had been achieved”. Today, a million virtual petition signatures are an indication of good digital marketing skills, not the devotion of the organisers or the signatories to a cause.View image in fullscreenThis is why labour unions are so critically important. They organise people to come together in the real world and to engage in a series of collective actions that ultimately can’t be ignored. At their best, unions facilitate collective discipline and long-haul dedication, enabling people to use a clear form of leverage: the withholding of labour.To make a real and lasting mark, transformative solidarity must involve expanding the number of supporters while also strengthening the relationships between participants. Consider the civil rights movement. Today, everyone knows about the Montgomery bus boycott led by Rosa Parks, but few realise it lasted 381 days, and we rarely acknowledge the years of organising that laid the groundwork, nor do we recall earlier efforts that helped hone the boycott in Montgomery, including the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953. Similarly, we have vague inklings that the suffragettes struggled to secure the right to vote, but we often fail to grasp the tireless decades of meetings, planning and petitioning, or we forget the fact that their tactics included property destruction: bombing, arson and breaking windows. These organisers didn’t confine themselves to civil debate, or seek unity with racist and patriarchal authorities who viewed Black people and women as subhuman. They engaged in an unremitting, high-stakes confrontation.An excellent example of the power of radical imagination in building transformative solidarity is the movement for disability justice. The idea that disabled people occupy a distinct social category first began to take shape amid the large-scale social changes of the 19th-century industrial era. This was the period when workers began to see themselves as a cohesive group with a unique form of social power, and when women and also gay people, particularly gay men, began to understand themselves in new ways.Something similar was true of disabled people. Of course, mentally and physically impaired people have always existed, but the nature of the barriers and prejudice disabled people face, as well as the ways disability is understood, have changed as underlying conditions have evolved. While religious superstition and persecution of disabled people were common during the middle ages, preindustrial economies also permitted many people with a disability to contribute to their household’s economic survival; they lived and worked alongside family members at home or in nearby farms and workshops, doing tasks that their bodies could accomplish. As production industrialised, this ceased to be the case. Piecework and factory lines demanded rote precision, and people’s bodies were increasingly valued for their ability to make precise mechanical movements. “Industrial capitalism thus created not only a class of proletarians but also a new class of ‘disabled’ who did not conform to the standard worker’s body and whose labour-power was effectively erased, excluded from paid work,” observe scholars Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra. “As a result, disabled persons came to be regarded as a social problem and a justification emerged for segregating them out of mainstream life and into a variety of institutions, including workhouses, asylums, prisons, colonies and special schools.”In a world of rapidly increasing inequality and cutthroat competition, disability came to signify dependence and inferiority as eugenicist ideas gained ground. Social Darwinism, a popular form of eugenics thinking in the 19th century, rationalised discrimination against people with physical and mental impairments as well as other marginalised populations, to whom disabilities were attributed. Women, Black people, Jewish people, gay people and immigrants were all said to lack the physical and mental capacities required for full equality and inclusion – they were emotional, feeble-minded, degenerate, diseased and so on. Sadly, members of these groups too often reinforced the ableist stigma, distancing themselves from disabled people in an attempt to assert their full humanity and prove their relative worth.Given these pervasive prejudices and other barriers, it’s no wonder solidarity was slow to build among (and with) disabled people. And yet, if there is any oppressed group that has numbers on its side, it ispeople with disabilities, who make up the world’s largest minority – and a growing one, given the fact that every able-bodied person lucky to live long enough faces the prospect of joining those ranks. (One might imagine that would be grounds for a robust alliance of the able-bodied and disabled, yet the typical attitude of the able-bodied toward disabled people remains pity, not solidarity.)In the 1970s, the disability justice movement took off in earnest when people began to apply insights from the movement for racial equality to their own lives: perhaps they too were part of a constituency that was also entitled to civil rights? The mere possibility of a world that embraced every individual, regardless of physical or mental ability or health, provided motivation.Part of the challenge, in those early days, was that many disabled people didn’t necessarily identify as such. Instead, they saw themselves as individuals with distinctive embodiments or medical conditions. It wasn’t obvious to people with different impairments that they were part of the same “Us”. For solidarity to develop between a deaf person, a blind person, a person with cerebral palsy, a person with polio, a person missing a limb, a person with Down’s syndrome, and a person with autism or another form of neurodivergence, a shift in consciousness was required, an act of radical imagination.In the early days of the disability rights movement, organising work was even more challenging than it is today. Countless obstacles blocked the way, many of them physical, such as the existence of stairs where there could be a ramp. Even when disabled individuals embraced solidarity in principle, they had a difficult time physically joining with others to put their values into practice. When the call for disability rights first rang out, dropped kerbs and wheelchair lifts on public buses were rare or nonexistent in the US, and channels of communications were similarly inaccessible, which meant getting the word out could be as hard as getting out into the streets. Fortunately, activists understood that a small number of participants could have an outsised impact if they used the right tactics and had the right strategy. And so they began coordinated and confrontational campaigns of civil disobedience to vividly dramatise their oppression and demand public services and equal protection under the law.View image in fullscreenIn 1977 in San Francisco, about 150 disabled radicals occupied the fourth floor of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for 25 days. “Blind people, deaf people, wheelchair users, disabled veterans, people with developmental and psychiatric disabilities and many others, all came together,” leader Judith Heumann later recalled. “We overcame years of parochialism.”The demonstrators held their ground despite great physical discomfort – the space was not meant to be lived in, and certainly not by people with a wide range of functional needs – and demanded that officials clarify and enforce existing rules protecting disabled people from discrimination under certain circumstances. Knowledgable disabled spokespeople sparred with lawmakers about legislative proposals in televised broadcasts, and the organisers sent a delegation to Washington to further lobby officials. Brad Lomax, a member of the Black Panther Party who had multiple sclerosis, was responsible for the party bringing hot meals to the sit-in each day. The pivotal protest helped strengthen government regulations and provided an example for organisers around the country to follow. In Denver the next year, 19 disabled activists, the Gang of 19, got out of their wheelchairs and lay down to stop traffic, demanding accessible public transportation. That event directly led to the creation of the Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit, Adapt, which organised similar protests across the country and brought a further degree of militancy and national visibility to the movement.Once disabled people began to organise to build transformative solidarity, they changed the landscape of the US at an astonishing pace. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that, in many ways, is more far-reaching than its civil rights-era predecessor, for it requires not only that establishments open their doors to previously excluded groups, but that they remake the entrance, widening the frame and adding a ramp or an elevator.Today, we take dropped kerbs, wheelchair lifts, accessible bathroom stalls and closed captioning for granted, but each of these adaptations was hard-won. During the lead-up to the ADA’s passage, disabled activists secured critical support from key Republican officials, finding common ground with individual politicians who had disabled loved ones whose rights they felt called to protect. At the same time, activists refused to play into attempts to divide and conquer by homophobic conservative politicians who wanted the legislation to deny protections for people with HIV and Aids. Society has been dramatically transformed as a result of strategic organising by disabled people who imagined a world where discrimination wasn’t sanctioned by the state, and where people with a wide range of embodiments would be able to move around not only unimpeded, but actively and creatively assisted.Where disability rights are concerned, incredible progress has been made, but much remains to be done. Today, resources are funnelled into youth- and life-extension therapies, instead of into planning for the unavoidable reality of human difference, ageing and fragility. We obsess over personal wellness while sidelining the issue of public health. We focus on cures for impairments and illness, when we should also work to make the world more hospitable to those who are disabled or unwell. Meanwhile, we fail to examine how our economic system maims and sickens millions – think repetitive stress injuries on the job, how poverty negatively impacts mental health, or asthma or cancer caused by poisoned air – while denying people treatment and care.Instead of submitting to this injury and devaluation, we should heed disability theorist Alison Kafer’s call to organise toward what she calls an “accessible future” – one that values and makes space for a multitude of bodies and modes of moving, thinking and being. As some early theorists of solidarity recognised more than a century ago, we are all interdependent, and we all begin and often end our lives in states of total dependency. Instead of marginalising disabled people and vilifying vulnerability, a society founded on the principle of solidarity would understand human variation and mutual reliance as the basis of a decent and desirable society.The kind of solidarity required to secure a more accessible and inclusive future will not appear spontaneously. It needs to be organised into being. Real organising is a kind of alchemy: a process that turns alienation into connection, despair into dedication, and oppression into strength while fashioning a whole that is stronger than its parts.Again and again, people build solidarity and leave the world a better place, as the examples of movements for labour, civil and disability rights all show. And yet we still struggle to tell these inherently collective stories. Too often the tale of “Us” gets whittled down into a tale of an “I” – a story about a visionary liberator or self-sacrificing saint who changed the world. We turn a handful of protesters and rebels into icons, but hear comparatively little about the organising communities that shaped and supported them, or the ones that they tried to build to carry their efforts forward.Our simplifying, celebrity-obsessed culture distorts the legacies of talented organisers and historical figures while also amplifying a handful of contemporary telegenic activists – the latter too often possessing a knack for social media and self-promotion, but lacking a commitment to an organised base they are accountable to. This emphasis on lone heroes is a kind of flipside to the fixation on increasing numbers for their own sake, or on notching bigger protests rather than better ones. An unhelpful binary emerges as a result: social movements are imagined to consist of charismatic individuals on the one side and nameless masses on the other.But real organising is something else entirely. Every successful effort to challenge the status quo has required a multitude of people playing a wide range of roles. Allowing for this diversity is one way to grow both numbers and meaningful organisation. When we come together in an organised fashion – forging new self-conceptions, embracing radical visions and acting strategically – we can wield the power of numbers to disrupt business as usual, wrest concessions and pave the way for future victories.Adapted from Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, published by Pantheon Books More

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      John Lewis review: superb first biography of a civil rights hero

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      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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      ‘He’d been through the fire’: John Lewis, civil rights giant, remembered

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      When he was a Ku Klux Klansman in South Carolina, Elwin Wilson helped carry out a vicious assault that left John Lewis with bruised ribs, cuts to his face and a deep gash on the back of his head. Half a century later, Wilson sought and received Lewis’s forgiveness. Then both men appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show.Wilson looked overwhelmed, panicked by the bright lights of the studio, where nearly 180 of Lewis’s fellow civil rights activists had gathered. But then Lewis smiled, leaned over, gently held Wilson’s hand and insisted: “He’s my brother.” There was not a dry eye in the house.Raymond Arsenault, author of the first full-length biography of Lewis, the late congressman from Georgia, describes this act of compassion and reconciliation as a quintessential moment.“For him, it was all about forgiveness,” Arsenault says. “That’s the central theme of his life. He believed that you couldn’t let your enemies pull you down into the ditch with them, that you had to love your enemies as much as you loved your friends and your loved ones.”It was the secret weapon, the way to catch enemies off-guard. Bernard Lafayette, a Freedom Rider and close friend of Lewis, a key source for Arsenault, calls it moral jujitsu.Arsenault adds: “They’re expecting you to react like a normal human being. When you don’t, when you don’t hate them, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. The case of Mr Wilson was classic. I’ve never seen anything like it in my lifetime, for sure.”Arsenault, a history professor at the University of South Florida, St Petersburg, has written books about the Freedom Riders – civil rights activists who rode buses across the south in 1961 to challenge segregation in transportation – and two African American cultural giants: contralto Marian Anderson and tennis player Arthur Ashe.He first met Lewis in 2000, in Lewis’s congressional office in Washington DC, a mini museum of books, photos and civil rights memorabilia.“The first day I met him, I called him ‘Congressman Lewis’ and he said: ‘Get that out of here. I’m John. Everybody calls me John.’ It wasn’t an affectation. He meant it. He seemed to value human beings in such an equalitarian way.”Lewis asked for Arsenault’s help tracking down Freedom Riders for a 40th anniversary reunion. It was the start of a friendship that would last until Lewis’s death, at 80 from pancreatic cancer, in 2020.“From the very start I saw that he was an absolutely extraordinary human being,” Arsenault says. “I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite like him – absolutely without ego, selfless. People have called him saintly and that’s probably fairly accurate.”Arsenault was approached to write a biography by the historian David Blight, who with Henry Louis Gates Jr and Jacqueline Goldsby sits on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Black Lives series. The resulting book, John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community, examines a rare journey from protest leader to career politician, buffeted by the winds of Black nationalism, debates over the acceptability of violence and perennial tensions between purity and pragmatism.Arsenault says Lewis “was certainly more complicated than I thought he would be when I started. He tried to keep his balance, but it was not easy because a lot of people wanted him to be what is sometimes called in the movement a ‘race man’ and he wasn’t a race man, even though he was proud of being African American and very connected to where he came from. He was always more of a human rights person than a civil rights person.“If he had to choose between racial loyalty or solidarity and his deeper values about the Beloved Community [Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of a just and compassionate society], he always chose the Beloved Community and it got him in hot water. He, for example, was criticised for attacking Clarence Thomas during the [1991 supreme court nomination] hearings and of course he proved to be absolutely right on that one.“There were other cases where if there was a good white candidate running and a Black man who wasn’t so good, he’d choose the white candidate and he didn’t apologise for it. He took a lot of heat for that. Now he’s such a beloved figure sometimes people forget that he marched to his own drummer.”Lewis’s philosophy represented a confluence of Black Christianity and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Arsenault says. “He had this broader vision. There’s not a progressive cause that you can mention that he wasn’t involved with in some way or another.“He was a major environmentalist. There was a lot of homophobia in the Black community in those years but not even a hint [in Lewis]. He was also a philosemite: he associated Jews as being people of the Old Testament and he was so attracted to them as natural allies. Never even a moment of antisemitism or anything like that. He was totally ahead of his time in so many ways.”‘A man of action’Lewis was born in 1940, outside Troy in Pike county, Alabama, one of 10 children. He grew up on his family’s farm, without electricity or indoor plumbing, and attended segregated public schools in the era of Jim Crow. As a boy, he wanted to be a minister.Arsenault says: “I have a picture of him in the book when he was 11; they actually ran something in the newspaper about this boy preacher. He had something of a speech impediment but preached to the chickens on the farm. They were like his children or his congregation, his flock, and he loved to tell those stories.“But he was always bookish, different from his big brothers and sisters. He loved school. He loved to read. In fact his first protesting was to try to get a library card at the all-white library.”Denied a library card, Lewis became an avid reader anyway. He was a teenager when he first heard King preach, on the radio. They met when Lewis was seeking support to become the first Black student at the segregated Troy State University.“He was a good student and a conscientious student but he realised that he was a man of action, as he liked to say. He loved words but was always putting his body on the line. It’s a miracle he survived, frankly, more than 40 beatings, more than 40 arrests and jailings, far more than any other major figure. You could add all the others up and they wouldn’t equal the times that John was behind bars.”Lewis began organising sit-in demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters and volunteering as a Freedom Rider, enduring beatings and arrests. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming its chair in 1963. That year, he was among the “Big Six” organisers of the civil rights movement and the March on Washington, where at the last minute he agreed to tone down his speech. Still, Lewis made his point, with what Arsenault calls “far and away the most radical speech given that day”.In 1965, after extensive training in non-violent protest, Lewis, still only 25, and the Rev Hosea Williams led hundreds of demonstrators on a march of more than 50 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. In Selma, police blocked their way off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Troopers wielded truncheons, fired tear gas and charged on horseback. Walking with his hands tucked in the pockets of his tan overcoat, Lewis was knocked to the ground and beaten, suffering a fractured skull. Televised images of such state violence forced a reckoning with southern racial oppression.Lewis returned to and crossed the bridge every year and never tired of talking about it, Arsenault says: “He wasn’t one to talk about himself so much, but he was a good storyteller and Bloody Sunday was a huge deal for him. He said later he thought he was going to die, that this was it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He passed through an incredible rite of passage as a non-violent activist and nothing could ever be as bad again. He’d been through the fire and so it made him tougher and more resilient. It’s origins of the legend. He was well considered as a Freedom Rider, certainly, and already had a reputation but that solidified it and extended it in a way that made him a folk hero within the movement.”Lewis turned to politics. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta city council. Five years later he won a seat in Congress. He would serve 17 terms. After Democrats won the House in 2006, Lewis became senior deputy whip, widely revered as the “conscience of the Congress”. Once a young SNCC firebrand, sceptical of politics, he became a national institution and a party man – up to a point.“That tension was always there,” Arsenault reflects. “He tried to be as practical and pragmatic as he needed to be but that wasn’t his bent.“He was much more in it for the long haul in terms of an almost utopian attitude about the Beloved Community. He probably enjoyed it more when he was a protest leader, when he was kind of a rebel. Maybe it’s not right to say he didn’t feel comfortable in Washington, but his heart was back in Atlanta and in Pike county. As his chief of staff once said, wherever he went in the world, he took Pike county with him.”The fire never dimmed. Even in his 70s, Lewis led a sit-in protest in the House chamber, demanding tougher gun controls. As a congressman, he was arrested five times.“He was absolutely determined and, as he once said: ‘I’m not a showboat, I’m a tugboat.’ He loved that line. Nothing fancy. Just a person who did the hard work and was always willing to put his body on the line,” Arsenault says.‘If he hated anyone, it was probably Trump’Lewis endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2008 but switched to Barack Obama, who became the first Black president. Obama honoured Lewis with the presidential medal of freedom and in 2015, on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, they marched hand in hand in Selma. Lewis backed Clinton again in 2016 but was thwarted by Donald Trump.Arsenault says: “He was thrilled by the idea of an Obama presidency and thought the world was heading in the right direction. He worked hard for Hillary in 2016 and thought for sure she was going to win, so it was just a devastating thing, as it was for a lot of us. He tried not to hate anyone and never would vocalise it but, if he hated anyone, it was probably Trump. He had contempt for him. He thought he was an awful man.“That was something I had to deal with in writing the book, because you like to think it’s going to be an ascending arc of hopefulness and things are going to get better over time, but in John Lewis’s life, the last three years were probably the worst in many respects because he thought that American democracy itself was on the line.”When Lewis died, Washington united in mourning – with a notable exception. Trump said: “He didn’t come to my inauguration. He didn’t come to my State of the Union speeches. And that’s OK. That’s his right. And, again, nobody has done more for Black Americans than I have.”Arsenault says: “They were almost like antithetical figures. Lewis was the anti-Trump in every conceivable way, but when he died in July 2020 he probably thought Trump was going to win re-election. Within the limits of his physical strength, which wasn’t great at that point, he did what he could, but the pancreatic cancer was so devastating from December 2019 until he died.“It was tough to deal with that part of the story but, in some ways, maybe it’s not all that surprising for someone whose whole life was beating the odds and going against the grain. He had suffered plenty of disappointments before that. It just made him more determined, tougher, and he was absolutely defiant of Trump.”Lewis enjoyed positive relationships with Republicans. “He was such a saintly person that whenever there were votes about the most admired person in Congress, it was always John Lewis. Even Republicans who didn’t agree with his politics but realised he was something special as a human being, as a man.“He had always been able to work across the aisle, probably better than most Democratic congressmen. He didn’t demonise the Republicans. It was Trumpism, this new form of politics, in some ways a throwback to the southern demagoguery of the early 20th century, this politics of persecution and thinly veiled racism. He passed without much sense that we were any closer to the Beloved Community.”Lewis did live to see the flowering of the Black Lives Matter movement after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He was inspired, a day before he went into hospital, to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza, near the White House.“For him it was the most incredible outpouring of non-violent spirit in the streets that he’d ever seen, that anybody had ever seen,” Arsenault says. “That was enormously gratifying for him. He thought that in some sense his message had gotten through and people were acting on these ideals of Dr King and Gandhi.“That was hugely important to him and to reinforcing his values and his beliefs and his hopes. I don’t think he was despondent at all because of that. If that had not happened, who knows? But he’d weathered the storms before and that’s what helped him to weather this storm, because it was it was so important to him.”Lewis enjoyed fishing, African American quilts, sweet potato pie, listening to music and, as deathless videos testify, dancing with joy. Above all, Arsenault hopes readers of his book will be moved by Lewis’s fidelity to the promise of non-violence.“When you think about what’s happening in Gaza and the Middle East and Ukraine right now, it’s horrible violence – and more than ever we need these lessons of the power of non-violence. [Lewis] was the epitome of it. You can’t help but come away with an admiration for what he was able to do in his lifetime, how far he travelled. He had no advantages in any way.“The idea that he was able to have this life and career and the American people and the world would be exposed to a man like this – in some ways he is like Nelson Mandela. He didn’t spend nearly 30 years in prison, but I think of them as similar in many ways. I hope people will be inspired to think about making the kind of sacrifices that he made. He gave everybody the benefit of the doubt.”
      John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      in US Politics

      Revisited: Al Sharpton on 60 years since the march on Washington – podcast

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      The Politics Weekly America team are taking a break. So this week, we’re looking back at one of our favourite episodes of the year.
      From August: Jonathan Freedland sits down with Rev Al Sharpton to discuss why he believes Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech has been abused by some on the right, why he is still fighting for police reform, and how James Brown was so influential on his life

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

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      Bayard Rustin review: fine portrait of a giant of protest and politics

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      At only about 200 pages, Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is a pleasure to read, 23 contributors giving their take on the great civil rights advocate. Edited by the scholar Michael G Long, it is a must for those who want to better understand the complexity of a Black hero who was also an imperfect man.Rustin, the Obama-produced feature film airing on Netflix, is the most prominent example an industry of emergent Rustin scholarship. A spate of Rustin essays, Rustin books and Rustin docuseries round out the genre. They commemorate the 60th anniversary of Rustin’s foremost achievement: the March on Washington of 1963, a great protest for African American civil and economic rights.The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 was among its results. Long explains how, with this peaceful demonstration as a template, “millions of protesters … would similarly march on Washington for women’s rights, labor rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and so much more. No protest in US history has been more influential and consequential.”What is it that makes the book Long has edited so special? It is its economy. Without spending a long time, from several angles you get a good picture of who Rustin was.I never met Rustin, but I did meet and was befriended by Walter Naegle. Legally adopted by Rustin so no one could contest his eventual bequest, in any real sense Naegle is Rustin’s widower. They met in 1977 and were together for the final decade of Rustin’s life.“He had a wonderful shock of white hair,” Naegle writes. “I guess he was of my parents’ generation, but we looked at each other and lightning struck.”When he moved to New York in the late 1930s, Rustin joined the 15th Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Any source one consults emphasizes how imperative his Quaker upbringing was. He was reared not by his unmarried teenaged mother but by his maternal grandmother. Her beliefs inspired his highly moral sense of ethics.Naegle writes: “Bayard always credited Julia [Edith Davis Rustin] with having the most profound impact on his early development. She attended West Chester, Pennsylvania’s Friends School. Her education stressed ‘human family oneness, equality, integrity, community, and peace through nonviolence’. It was this Quaker nonviolence, enhanced by Gandhi’s version, that Rustin studied in India, which he taught to Rev Martin Luther King. This was how King’s movement changed history.”I always assumed that as a boy Rustin followed a trajectory similar to that followed by his grandmother. I envisioned him interacting with white Quakers with ease. But Naegle relates something else. When she married, Rustin’s grandmother joined her husband’s African Methodist Episcopal church. Notwithstanding the strong Quaker identity they shared, neither she nor Bayard were welcome to attend the West Chester Friends Meeting. Far from the “Peaceable Kingdom” I pictured, Rustin experienced a grimmer youth. Replete with racial segregation, there was even a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.All the same, Rustin’s Quaker beliefs led him to pacifism. A conscientious objector during the second world war, he received a two-year prison term. He sought to serve fellow inmates, organizing them to protest for better conditions. Earlier, at Wilberforce University, Rustin had been expelled for organizing students – and for being gay. Jail authorities didn’t hesitate to use his sexuality against him. To be queer was to be perceived as deviant and depraved. Confessing his sexuality to his grandmother, he had only been admonished: “Never associate with anyone who has less to lose than you do.” In prison it was a different matter. Black or white, on learning about Rustin’s sexuality, most prisoners wanted nothing to do with him.Being deemed deviant and illegal haunted Rustin’s life well after his release in 1946. One friend stood by him steadfastly. A fellow socialist, Asa Philip Randolph, had established America’s first Black labor union, the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin’s capabilities as an organizer, orator and agitator impressed Randolph early. Their first big protest, a 1941 march on the capital, was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt desegregated war production contracts.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy 1960, the worst sex scandal of all threatened to break into public. Envious, Harlem’s Black congressional representative demanded that King cancel a demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention. In his contribution to A Legacy of Protest and Politics, John d’Emilio tells us how the Rev Adam Clayton Powell Jr promised: “If King did not call off the protests … Powell would [claim] that King and Rustin were having a sexual affair. King immediately canceled the demonstrations.”Three years later, before the March on Washington, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attempted to kill it by reading an old Rustin arrest into the record. It backfired. People laughed. Thanks to Randolph, Rustin was back. Some 250,000 people were safely transported to the Lincoln Memorial. The sound system worked and so did the portable toilets. Despite an overwhelming police presence, no one was shot.Rustin was multifaceted but fallible. In this insightful book, several observers contend that no one else could have done as well. Others are impressed by how Rustin combated oppression and injustice around the world. He helped normalize radical solutions to enduring problems like unemployment and inequality. His endorsement of a two-state solution in the Middle East was tact itself. However, chided by Malcolm X, Rustin’s nonviolent stance evolved. Addressing the Watts riots, he noted somberly: “If negro rioting is to be avoided in the future, it will be because negroes are enabled to get out of the vicious cycle of frustration that breeds aggression; because this country proves that it is capable of creating a new economic way of life without unemployment, without slums, without poverty.”This book makes clear that Bayard Rustin, a man for his time, is a man for our time too.
      Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics is published in the US by New York University Press More

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      in US Politics

      How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history

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      The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.
      Diane McWhorter is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama – The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution More