THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 11
COMMENT
REDEEMINGAMERICA
J
ohn Robert Lewis was born in 1940
near the Black Belt town of Troy,
Alabama. His parents were sharecroppers,
and he grew up spending Sundays with
a great-grandfather who was born into
slavery, and hearing about the lynch-
ings of Black men and women that were
still a commonplace in the region. When
Lewis was a few months old, the manager
of a chicken farm named Jesse Thornton
was lynched about twenty miles down
the road, in the town of Luverne. His
offense was referring to a police officer
by his first name, not as “Mister.” A
mob pursued Thornton, stoned and
shot him, then dumped his body in a
swamp; it was found, a week later, sur-
rounded by vultures.
These stories, and the realities of
Jim Crow-era segregation, prompted
Lewis to become an American dissi-
dent. Steeped in the teachings of his
church and the radio sermons of Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr., he left home for
Nashville, to study theology and the
tactics of nonviolent resistance. King
teased him as “the boy from Troy,” the
youngest face at the forefront of the
movement. In a long career as an ac-
tivist, Lewis was arrested forty-five
times and beaten repeatedly by the po-
lice and by white supremacists, most
famously in Selma, on March 7, 1965—
Bloody Sunday—when he helped lead
six hundred people marching for vot-
ing rights. After they had peacefully
crossed a bridge, Alabama troopers at-
tacked, using tear gas, clubs, and bull-
whips. Within moments of their charge,
Lewis lay unconscious, his skull frac-
tured. He later said, “I thought I was
going to die.”
Too often in this country, seeming
progress is derailed, reversed, or over-
whelmed. Bloody Sunday led directly to
the passage of the Voting Rights Act––
and yet suppressing the Black vote is a
pillar of today’s Republican Party strat-
egy. The election of the first African-
American President was followed by
a bigot running for election, and now
reëlection, on a platform of racism and
resentment. The murder of Jesse Thorn-
ton has its echoes in the murders of
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many
others. Indeed, to this day, the bridge
where Lewis nearly lost his life is named
in honor of Edmund Pettus, a U.S. sen-
ator who was a Confederate officer and
a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku
Klux Klan.
And so there were times when Lewis,
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
who died on Friday, at the age of eighty,
might have felt the temptation at times
to give up, to give way. But it was prob-
ably his most salient characteristic that
he always refused despair; with open
eyes, he acknowledged the darkest chap-
ters of American history yet insisted that
change was always possible. Recently,
he took part in a Zoom town hall with
Barack Obama and a group of activists,
and told them that he had been inspired
by the weeks of demonstrations for ra-
cial justice across the country. The pro-
testers, he said, will “redeem the soul of
America and move closer to a commu-
nity at peace with itself.”
Dissent is an essential component of
the American story and the American
future. In that spirit, we bring you this
archival issue of The New Yorker, repub-
lishing Profiles, reporting, essays, fiction,
and poetry on this theme. Some of the
figures written about here were dissent-
ers in the public arena, like Dr. King,
Margaret Fuller, and Cesar Chavez, who
set out to battle the established order
of racism, misogyny, and exploitation.
Others were artists, like Langston Hughes
and Toni Morrison, who provide the vi-
sion and the language to understand our
predicament and, perhaps, to help trans-
form it. And then there are those, like
the scientist James Hansen, whose brav-
ery is to insist on the validity of fact,
when willful ignorance can lead to the
catastrophic warming of the planet—
or to the spread of a deadly virus. All
of them persevered against countless
obstacles even as they knew they might
not live to see their most fundamental
struggles concluded.
––David Remnick
