FRIDAY, JULY 31 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
moment when their lives briefly
touched.
Williams thought about Lewis’s
life and how he would explain it to
his daughter. “I’m so happy for the
life that he led, because if it wasn’t
for him, this Black Lives Matter
movement now might not have
been possible,” he said. “I will tell
her that he fought for what he
believed in and he did it coura-
geously and he did it bravely, and I
will tell her that we need to have
that same kind of courage and
bravery for the things that we
stand for and the things that we
believe in.”
He imagined a photo of the two
of them ending up in the National
Museum of African American His-
tory and Culture, or in a textbook.
“That’s when I started to tear
up,” he says.
[email protected]professional until Lewis took a
photograph with his 2-year-old
daughter, Maevyn. His wife, Dvon,
had been holding onto her the
whole time, having broken their
months-long isolation to tag along
on the assignment, along with
Williams’s mom. (Gary Sr. had
stayed in Virginia to watch Wil-
liams’s 8-month-old son, Canon.)
When Maevyn is old enough to
understand, Williams plans to tell
her who John Lewis was and what
he did — not just for the country,
but for Black people specifically —
and what he proved possible: that
“if we can endure those hardships
and challenges, there is light,” Wil-
liams says. “There is progress on
the other side.” On the same day
Lewis saw “Black Lives Matter”
painted on the streets of Washing-
ton he also met Maevyn, and Wil-
liams had been able to capture thethe work,” he said, “whether it’s
in-the-street protests or a simple
act of voting.”
Lewis said he wanted to walk
on the plaza itself. Down on the
street, people began to recognize
him, including city workers who
were maintaining the paint on the
plaza. City workers driving by on a
garbage truck stopped and let Wil-
liams and another photographer
climb through the trash to the roof
and take some overhead shots of
Lewis. Lewis spent 45 minutes
taking photos with the workers
and anyone else who wanted one.
People came up to thank him, or
tell him that they loved him. When
a reporter asked Lewis how he felt,
he replied, “ The people in D.C. and
around the world are sending a
powerful message that we will get
there.”
Williams kept it together as a“Bloody Sunday.”
Williams’s mother, Chrystal,
made sure her son read up on
Lewis and other leaders of the civil
rights movement, not just to know
his Black history, but, he says, “to
know that there are folks who put
their lives on the line so that life
could be better for others.” Self-
lessness, he says, was a lesson his
parents were always trying to im-
part, that the world didn’t revolve
around him. “And John Lewis
made the ultimate selfless act,”
Williams said, “being beaten with-
in an inch of his life and deciding
to get back out there and continue
fighting for the civil rights move-
ment.” It was a lesson he hoped to
teach his 2-year-old daughter and
infant son when they grow old
enough to understand. “Even to
this day my parents stress how
important it is to continue to do“It was a personal moment,”
Williams said. “He just wanted
some photos to document his vis-
it.”
The plan was to go first thing in
the morning, before the crowds.
Just the three of them: Lewis,
Collins and Williams, a 38-year-
old co-founder of a Black-owned
D.C. creative agency. But Williams
wanted to give Lewis a bird’s-eye
view of the mural, and he had to
enlist the help of friends in the
mayor’s office to get access to a
rooftop that was otherwise closed
because of the pandemic. The per-
sonal moment became more cere-
monious.
Lewis had gone through a
round of chemotherapy the day
before, Collins told Williams, and
he would be admitted to the hospi-
tal the following day. He leaned on
a cane and wore a cap that read,
“1619” and “400 years.” As he
walked to the edge of the roof,
everyone got quiet.
“He didn’t say anything, and
with his mask on it was hard to
read his facial expression, but you
could see it in his eyes that this
was a moment of reflection,” Wil-
liams said. “And I kept saying to
myself as I’m taking these photos
of him, ‘I wonder what he’s think-
ing.’ ” (“I just had to see and feel it
for myself,” Lewis wrote in an es-
say for the New York Times, pub-
lished after his death, “that, after
many years of silent witness, the
truth is still marching on.”)
Behind the camera, Williams
was having his own reflective mo-
ment. He’d learned about John
Lewis from his own parents, as
they told him stories of racism
they’d experienced growing up in
Virginia and Delaware in the ’60s
and ’70s. His father, Gary Sr., told
him about the time one of his
friends dared to walk down a
stairwell where the White stu-
dents hung out. “One of the White
gentlemen just punched him and
knocked him out,” says Williams,
starting a near brawl. “My dad just
told me that to share what he had
to go through every day at school
just to push through and get an
education. That was the hostile
environment he had to learn in.”
J ohn Lewis had been beaten up
regularly for entering White spac-
es: Attacked for entering a Whites-
only area at a bus station in Rock
Hill, S.C. Hit in the head with a
wooden crate and left uncon-
scious at another bus station, in
Montgomery, Ala. Getting his
skull cracked by police while
marching across the Edmund Pet-
tus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on
LEWIS FROM C1
A special vantage point on Lewis’s last public appearance
GARY D. WILLIAMS JR./CREATIVE THEORY AGENCYconcluded with a telling quote
from the political theorist
Hannah Arendt that bears
repetition now. Through an
onslaught of lies, which may be
debunked before the cycle is
repeated, totalitarian leaders are
able to instill in their followers
“a mixture of gullibility and
cynicism,” she warned.
Over time, people are
conditioned to “believe
everything and nothing, think
that everything was possible and
that nothing was true.” And then
such leaders can do pretty much
whatever they wish.
With the lies in a viral video, a
president’s stamp of approval,
and the confirmation that social
media is how more and more
Americans get their supposed
“news,” we’ve moved a big step
closer to that reality.
And we should be afraid.
[email protected]For more by Margaret Sullivan visit
wapo.st/sullivanwatch,” got his hand slapped by
Twitter — briefly losing his right
to sully the truth and jam the
gears of reality.
A low point, certainly, in a
long series of them over the past
few years — all happening even
as congressional Republicans
tried to turn Wednesday’s
appearance by four titans of tech
at a landmark antitrust hearing
into a politicized rant about how
social media doesn’t give
conservatives a fair shot.
This is patently untrue, also.
Week after week, Fox News,
Breitbart News and others of
their right-wing ilk reign at the
top of Facebook’s list of the most
engaged-with content. And
Facebook doesn’t do nearly
enough to keep harmful lies —
often promoted by the far right
— off its platform.
In a sweeping piece on
disinformation and the 2020
campaign in February — in the
pre-pandemic era — the
Atlantic’s McKay Coppinsand witches,” Sommer wrote.
“She alleges alien DNA is
currently used in medical
treatments, and that scientists
are cooking up a vaccine to
prevent people from being
religious. And, despite
appearing in Washington, D.C.,
to lobby Congress on Monday,
she has said that the
government is run in part not by
humans but by ‘reptilians’ and
other aliens.”
Immanuel said in a recent
speech in Washington that the
power of hydroxychloroquine as
a treatment means that
protective masks aren’t
necessary. None of this has a
basis in fact — but try telling
that to the tens of millions who
have not only seen it but been
urged to believe it.
The video featuring Immanuel
and others eventually was taken
down by Facebook. But as usual,
it was far too late.
And Donald Trump Jr., who
tweeted it out calling it a “mustas their pathway to news are
more ignorant and more
misinformed than those who
come to news through print, a
news app on their phones or
network TV.
And that group is growing.
The report’s language may be
formal and restrained, but the
meaning is utterly clear — and
while not surprising, it’s
downright scary in its
implications.
“Even as Americans who
primarily turn to social media
for political news are less aware
and knowledgeable about a wide
range of events and issues in the
news, they are more likely than
other Americans to have heard
about a number of false or
unproven claims.”
Specifically, they’ve been far
more exposed to the conspiracy
theory that powerful people
intentionally planned the
pandemic. Yet this group, says
Pew, is also less concerned about
the impact of made-up news like
this than the rest of the U.S.
population.
They’re absorbing fake news,
but they don’t see it as a
problem. In a society that
depends on an informed
citizenry to make reasonably
intelligent decisions about self-
governance, this is the worst
kind of trouble.
And the president — who
knows exactly what he is doing
— is making it far, far worse. His
war on the nation’s traditional
press is a part of the same
scheme: information warfare,
meant to mess with reality and
sow as much confusion as
possible.
Will Sommer of the Daily
Beast took a deeper look this
week into the beliefs of Stella
Immanuel — the Houston doctor
whom Trump has termed “very
impressive” and “spectacular.”
“She has often claimed that
gynecological problems like
cysts and endometriosis are in
fact caused by people having sex
in their dreams with demons
SULLIVAN FROM C1
MARGARET SULLIVAN
Many Americans readily absorb fake news online
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump, flanked by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, left, and White House chief of staff
Mark Meadows, talks to reporters on Wednesday. The president retweeted a video featuring a group of
fringe doctors touting an unproven coronavirus cure this week.Photographer Gary
Williams Jr.’s mother,
Chrystal Banks-Cooper,
right, his wife, Dvon
Williams, and their
daughter, Maevyn
Williams, speak with
Rep. John Lewis at Black
Lives Matter Plaza on
June 7. Behind the
camera, Gary Williams
was having his own
reflective moment.fore Kent’s tenure. Most have
been highly experienced and left
successful positions to come to
the ballet. Before coming to the
Washington Ballet, Pastreich was
president and chief executive of
the St. Petersburg-based Florida
Orchestra, the state’s largest,
which he led for 11 years. Yet a
pattern had been established un-
der former artistic director Sep-
time Webre: The top executives,
by and large, leave after two or
three years. Some leave sooner.
Founded in 1976, the ballet
company has a deep history and adedicated donor base. So why
isn’t it more successful at holding
onto its financial leaders?
“The real power is the board
chair,” said a former senior staff
member at the ballet, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity because
they were not authorized to speak
publicly on behalf of the ballet.
The board typically forms a
close bond with the artistic direc-
tor, and this feeds a tendency to
allow the director “to dream as
big as he or she wants, and if it
drives the company into the
ground, so be it,” this person said.
In any arts organization, the
executive and artistic directors
work together to realize the artis-
tic vision. This is where tensions
may arise, especially if there is
not a culture of equal partner-
ship between the artistic and
executive leaders.
At the Washington Ballet, “if
the executive directors try to
impose any discipline, they get
ousted,” the former staff member
said. “The board would never
back up the executive director
because that wasn’t sexy or fun.”
[email protected]cording to spokesman Scott
Greenberg.
In an email to The Washington
Post, Pastreich wrote that he,
Kent and board chairwoman
Jean-Marie Fernandez have been
preparing for the announcement
for months.
“I was in the midst of purchas-
ing a business before coming to
TWB,” Pastreich wrote. “With all
that is happening in the world
right now, this seems like a very
opportune moment to return to
the business buying path.” He
indicated that he does not yet
have a specific business target
and that a decision on that will
“take months to do well.”
Neither Fernandez nor Kent
immediately returned requests
for comment. Interim leadership
plans have not been announced.
Pastreich’s exit and the season
cancellation arrive on the heels of
covid-19 cases arising after the
ballet’s gala June 18. Kent and
one of the dancers fell ill with the
virus, as did the gala co-chair-
woman Ashley Bronczek. The on-
line gala included live-streamed
performances and remarks given
at the ballet’s Wisconsin Avenue
NW headquarters.
Greenberg wrote in an email
that Pastreich’s brief tenure is
ending at “a natural pivot point.
There will be huge shifts in lead-
ership and greatly reduced staff-
ing in all organizations, especial-
ly those in the arts community,
during the global health crisis.
Michael’s decision to leave was
his own, but supported by all.”
The ballet anticipates a sur-
plus when it finalizes numbers
for its current fiscal year, Green-
berg said. Preliminary figures, he
said, show the ballet’s total debt
has decreased. In December
2019, the company sold a house it
owned adjacent to its building
for $1.85 million. (Kent and her
family had lived in the house
since she was named director.)
Pastreich’s exit brings into
sharp focus the ballet’s consis-
tent loss of executives, even be-BALLET FROM C1Ballet has seen frequent
turnover in leadership
“Michael’s decision to
leave was his own, but
supported by all.”
Scott Greenberg, spokesman for
Washington Ballet