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John Lewis knew civil rights did not end with voting reform or Barack Obama
Peniel E Joseph
The Georgia congressman’s life was more complex than tributes might make out. His embrace of Black Lives Matter shows he knew racist oppression never came close to ending More
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Civil rights movement
Winfrey releases footage of recent interview
View from Washington: the legacy of John Lewis
Obituary: John Lewis, 1940-2020
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John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report
Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey have led tributes from across US society to the civil rights leader and Georgia congressman John Lewis, who died on Friday evening at the age of 80.
Lewis, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, dedicated his life to the fight for racial equality and justice and worked closely with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s, the high water mark of the civil rights movement in the US. He became a congressman in 1987.
“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” Obama wrote in a Medium post. “And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice, but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.”
Winfrey released footage of Lewis speaking during a recorded conversation between the two last week. Posting the footage, Winfrey wrote: “He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. I had a final chance to tell him what I’ve said every time I’ve been in his presence: ‘Thank you for your courage leading the fight for freedom. My life as it is would not have been possible without you.’
“I know for sure he heard me. I felt good about that. He understood and was so gracious.”
In the interview, shot to mark a CNN documentary entitled John Lewis: Good Trouble, the congressman said: “I tried to do what was right, fair and just. When I was growing up in rural Alabama, my mother always said, ‘Boy, don’t get in trouble … but I saw those signs that said ‘white’, ‘colored’, and I would say, ‘Why?’
“And she would say again, ‘Don’t get in trouble. You will be beaten. You will go to jail. You may not live. But … the words of Dr King and the actions of Rosa Parks inspired me to get in trouble. And I’ve been getting in trouble ever since. Good trouble. Necessary trouble.”
Oprah Winfrey
(@Oprah)
Last week when there were false rumors of Congressman John Lewis’ passing, Gayle and I called and were able to speak with him. He sounded weak but was surprisingly more alert than we expected. pic.twitter.com/8kRRDMTvFm
July 18, 2020
Lewis was a prominent figure in many key events of the civil rights era, prominent among them the March on Washington in 1963 and a voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 on what would come to be known as Bloody Sunday.
State troopers attacked peaceful protesters with clubs and tear gas. A police officer knocked Lewis to the ground and hit him in the head with a nightstick, then struck him again as he tried to get up, he would later testify in court.
Images of Lewis being beaten are some of the most enduring of the era. Film of events in Selma was shown on national television, galvanizing support for the Voting Rights Act.
Pettus, for whom the bridge is named, was a slaveholding member of the Confederate army, a leader in the Klu Klux Klan and a man “bent on preserving slavery and segregation”, Smithsonian Magazine wrote.
A petition to change the name of the bridge to memorialize Lewis now has more than 400,000 signatures.
Lewis was the son of sharecroppers in Alabama but represented a Georgia district for 33 years in the US House of Representatives. In one of his last public appearances, he walked a street in front of the White House in Washington painted with a Black Lives Matter mural, a tribute to a movement he saw as a continuation of his fight for racial equality.
Politicians paid tribute on Saturday, among them former presidents Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George W Bush, House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and, with a tweet and an order for flags to fly at half-staff, Donald Trump.
Ava DuVernay, the academy award-nominated director of the historical drama film Selma, a retelling of the 1965 march, wrote that she would “never forget what you taught me and what you challenged me to be”.
“Better. Stronger. Bolder. Braver. God bless you, Ancestor John Robert Lewis of Troy, Alabama. Run into His arms.”
Viola Davis, the first black actress to win a Tony, an Emmy and an Oscar, thanked Lewis for his “commitment to change” and “courage”. In one of Davis’s most famous roles, in the 2011 film The Help, she portrayed a maid in the Jim Crow south, a role she has since said catered to a white audience not “ready for the truth” about the black experience.
Stacey Abrams, who lost a race to become Georgia’s first black female governor after voting rolls were purged by her Republican opponent, called Lewis “a griot of this modern age”. Abrams’ organization Fair Fight continues to work to secure voting rights, a central demand of marchers in Selma.
Minister Bernice A King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr and Coretta Scott King, said Lewis “did, indeed, fight the good fight and get into a lot of good trouble”, thereby ensuring he “served God and humanity well”.
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Civil rights movement
To John Lewis, with love
Kevin Powell
From the March on Washington to Selma, from the halls of Congress to Black Lives Matter Plaza, you gave yourself to us
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John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report
Dear Mr Lewis,
I gasped when I learned of your death, after your courageous battle against cancer. I think of your December statement, when you said: “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
I shed tears then and I shed tears now, at what your passing represents to America and to the world. You do not know this, but the very first time I heard of you, in 1986, I was a Rutgers University student, asked by the Commission for Racial Justice to be part of a group of young people recreating the Freedom Rides you led during the civil rights movement.
We stopped in Atlanta, where you were running for Congress. You encouraged us, you gave us an on-the-spot civil rights history, you told us not to be afraid. You seemed to know that some of us, including me, were absolutely terrified.
Our bus went on to Alabama, to help African Americans protect their voting rights, just as you had done a generation before. When we heard troubling rumors of white supremacists “coming to get us” for repeating and continuing your work, I held tightly to your words in Atlanta, urging us to never give up – never.
That was 34 long years ago. I watched you become a congressman, an elder statesman, the humble and unassuming moral voice of America. I sat on panels with you at the Congressional Black Caucus Annual Legislative Conference. I saw you publicly saddened by attacks on the civil rights for which leaders like you were savagely beaten. That is why you were forever committed to making “Good Trouble” on behalf of democracy.
I myself have walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, many times. But my memories there are of you: of the bloodthirsty hatred of the police cracking your skull, how you could have died there on that ground, in your white trench coat, in 1965, just because you believed that Black people, all people, had the right to vote. I vote, Mr Lewis, because of you, because of people like you. I exist because of you, because of people like you.
And I have wondered, as you witnessed president after president, one racial murder after another, from your childhood until your death, how you could still possess such a massive capacity to love people, every kind of people, in spite of what you experienced in your 80 years on this planet, in this country. You did not merely preach love, you embodied it, and were clear that love was forever the answer.
Is that who you were, Mr Lewis, when you were a boy practicing your sermons to your chickens in your hometown of Troy, Alabama?
Is that who you were in 2017, when you led 1,000 people through Comic-Con, a march to celebrate the trilogy of comic books you had written, based on your life?
What a life it was, Mr Lewis. To be able to say you spoke at the same majestic March On Washington in 1963, where Dr King gave his “I Have A Dream” address, and to be the last living speaker from that sweltering August day. To be able to say you were there in Indianapolis, Indiana, on the day Bobby Kennedy announced to a mostly Black crowd that Martin Luther King Jr had been killed, Kennedy’s words rivaling King’s as one of the greatest speeches ever. To also say you were there, just two months later in Los Angeles, when Bobby himself was assassinated.
To be able to say that your cracked skull and many arrests in the 1960s led to Barack Obama becoming our first Black president, and to also be able to say you lived long enough to witness #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and protests unlike anything we have had since you yourself led nonviolent demonstrations those many years ago.
You never stopped protesting, Mr Lewis. In the final months of your life, there you were in Selma, honoring the 55th anniversary of that march. There you were in a virtual town hall meeting with Barack Obama. And there you were, in June, a mere month before your death, admiring the Black Lives Matter mural on the street leading to the White House.
You never gave up, Mr Lewis, and neither will I, and neither will we who believe in freedom, justice and equality for everyone. You, sir, were a living, breathing history book of America, a living, breathing example of the best of the human race.
The greatest thing you gave us, besides your entire life, was your entire love. The greatest salute to you we can give, is to love ourselves and each other as fiercely as you did us, to the very end.
Kevin Powell is a poet, journalist, civil and human rights activist, public speaker, and the author of 14 books, including his newest title, When We Free The World, a collection of essays about the present and future of America available exclusively on Apple Books.
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