74 The EconomistJuly 25th 2020
J
ohn lewishad a ritual that saw him through the early 1960s.
After being released from jail, he would head back to wherever he
was staying—usually a local family’s house—take a long shower,
put on jeans and a fresh shirt, find a little restaurant where he
could order a burger and a cold soda, drop a quarter in the jukebox
and play Curtis Mayfield or Aretha. He would sit down and, as he
wrote in his memoir, “let that music wash over me, just wash right
throughme. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt anything so sweet.”
If it seems like the ritual of a man at the end of a hard day’s work,
that is because it often was. Civil-rights activists across the south
faced arrest, usually on flimsy charges such as disorderly conduct
and disturbing the peace. It was all a part of what he called getting
into “good trouble” for acting and speaking out against injustice.
He never lost that habit. He was arrested for the 45th time in 2013,
his 26th year in Congress, at a rally for immigration reform.
Raised in a small house in Pike County, Alabama, without run-
ning water or electricity, he had put himself on an activist’s path
early. He applied for a library card at 16. He was denied, of course—
libraries, like everything else in Alabama then, were segregated—
but he drafted a petition arguing that the library should open its
doors to black Alabamans whose taxes helped pay for it.
He had recently heard a sermon on the radio by a young Baptist
minister from Atlanta named Martin Luther King junior, who
urged listeners to concern themselves not just with God’s King-
dom, but with racial injustice here on Earth. He also wanted to be a
preacher—when he was a boy, he had preached to his family’s
chickens—and King was the first one he heard use the Gospel to
ask how American Christians could believe in both brotherhood
and segregation. King could not accept it, and neither could he.
What he and King fought for was both radical, given America’s ra-
cial history, but also nothing more than an insistence that America
live up to its stated ideals of liberty and justice for all.His activism did not sit well with his parents, who were
ashamed when he was jailed. They urged him to “get out of this
movement, just get out of that mess.” He was not a gifted orator like
King, nor was he urbane like Julian Bond—a co-founder of the Stu-
dent Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (sncc) and the upper-
crust son of a college president whom in 1986 he defeated in the
race for the Atlanta congressional seat that he would hold until he
died. Small, broadly built and somewhat shy, he was a participant,
a doer, an organiser. In person, he was serious and warm, commit-
ted to his views but a first-rate listener.
Some of the better-educated members of the movement quietly
teased him for his country accent. But as Kelly Miller Smith, who
taught him the art of preaching at American Baptist College noted,
every word from him might as well be carved in granite, and car-
ried its own truth. His sense of purpose did not waver, even as oth-
ers retreated from activism, shell-shocked by what they had seen
and endured, or lost patience with the slow pace of change and the
requirement that they receive blows without giving any back.
But his non-violence was not soft or conciliatory; it was ada-
mantine, confrontational. His first Freedom Ride was in 1961, a bus
trip south in which black and white riders sat next to each other
and used the “wrong” restrooms and water fountains, provoking
beatings, sympathy and attention in order to get the federal gov-
ernment to enforce its ban on segregated facilities at bus and rail-
way stations. Before they left, some of his fellow Riders wrote
wills. A poor student of 21, he had nothing to leave anyone.
He defied Bobby Kennedy, then the attorney-general, and Roy
Wilkins, the head of the National Association for the Advancement
of Coloured People, who urged the Riders not to continue into Mis-
sissippi. Two years later, Kennedy conceded that “the young peo-
ple of sncchave educated me.” At the March on Washington in
1963—where, at just 23, he was by far the youngest speaker, and the
most strident—he vowed to “splinter the segregated South into a
thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God
and democracy.”
The night he was nearly beaten to death leading marchers
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama—March 7th
1965—he chastised Lyndon Johnson for sending federal troops to
Vietnam and Congo but not Alabama. He had been drawn to Selma
in part because of the repeated assaults on C.T. Vivian—a minister
and veteran activist who was to die on the same day he did—while
trying to register black voters. Johnson annonced the next day that
he was sending troops and signed the Voting Rights Act into law
five months later. But after Selma, as he wrote, “the road of non-vi-
olence had essentially run out,” and the civil-rights movement be-
gan to fracture.The beloved community
He settled in Atlanta, where he was elected to the city council, and
then to Congress. He sought votes from every constituency, blue-
and white-collar, Jewish and gay. He never stopped believing in
King’s Beloved Community, centred on radical love and justice,
never stopped making good trouble. In 1996, almost 20 years before
the Supreme Court ruled that gay-marriage bans violate the consti-
tution, he gave a stirring speech on the House floor calling mar-
riage “a basic human right” that should not be denied people just
because they happen to be gay.
Alone among March on Washington speakers, he lived long
enough to see America elect a black president. At lunch after the
inauguration in 2009, he approached the new president with a
commemorative photograph and asked for an autograph. Barack
Obama wrote, “Because of you, John”, and signed his name.
He spoke forcefully in favour of Donald Trump’s impeachment.
His last appearance was with Muriel Bowser, the seventh African-
American mayor of Washington, dc, standing on the newly paint-
ed Black Lives Matter plaza in front of the White House—a remind-
er of how far America had come, and how far it still has left to go. 7The congressman and civil-rights activist was 80A country’s conscience
Obituary John Lewis