His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Remedying four centuries of slavery, of segregation, and of inequality of opportunity is no simple matter. The witness of a Lewis and of a King and a Malcolm and a host of others was—and is—necessary to reform a nation in which racist ideas still prevail. Experience tells us that the task is staggeringly difficult. Lewis approached the work one way; many others choose different routes. In the fourth century, arguing against Christians who wanted to remove an altar to the pagan deity Victory, the Roman writer Symmachus noted, ‘We cannot attain to so great a mystery by one way.’

Nor can America attain racial, economic, and political justice in only one way. This book is about John Lewis and his vision, which was also the vision of Martin Luther King, and which changed, in a limited but real sense, how America saw itself. When the nation sees differently, it enhances its capacity to act differently. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, America has gradually expanded who’s included when the country speaks of ‘We the People.’”

Here in the Overture, Meacham notes the theme of racism in the United States. He refers to how its tenacious hold continues to this day and says that many approaches are needed to overcome it. The approach that this book describes is that of John Lewis and Martin Luther King: nonviolent resistance. Meacham emphasizes Lewis’s importance in making Americans view themselves more expansively and thereby helping create a more democratic nation.

“‘Sometimes I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them come and walk in my shoes,’ Lewis said at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013. ‘Come walk in the shoes of those who were attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail.’ Yet as often as Lewis was asked to look back, to tell the old stories and, in a sense, sing the old songs, he was always looking ahead, past the foot of the bridge and along the highway to come. He lived in hope.”

This quotation helps illustrate the real, meaningful changes that Lewis and others in the civil rights movement effected. Lewis, whose great-grandfather was born a slave, grew up in poverty in rural Alabama. In that highly segregated society, Jim Crow laws oppressed African Americans, and most were denied the right to vote. However, in Lewis’s lifetime, things had changed so much that someone like him could be a United States Congressman, elected to office with the strong support of African Americans exercising their right to vote. This gave him hope for the future, faith that the best was yet to come.

“To the young Lewis, the rhythms of the church were fascinating, fulfilling, and transporting. The stories of enslavement and deliverance and, above all, of radical love, carried him far beyond those muddy roads. He was at one with his fellow believers. In a harsh and segregated world—Lewis remembered seeing only two white people in his childhood, the mailman and a single traveling salesman—the church was comforting and restorative.”

Lewis’s religious faith, which originated far back in his childhood, sustained him from an early age. His family’s farm was in a rural, rather isolated section of Alabama, so he had little to draw on for growth and inspiration. He did, however, have the church, and he took to it with fervor. It helped him get through difficult and confusing parts of his early years and infused him with the Christian love that would become central to his life.

“I don’t think there’s any way to estimate how much that experience of tending those nesting hens taught me about discipline and responsibility, and, of course, patience […]. It was not a struggle, not at all. It was something I wanted to do. The kinship I felt with these other living creatures, the closeness, the compassion, is a feeling I carried with me out into the world from that point on. It might have been a feeling I was born with, I don’t know, but the first time I recall being aware of it was with those chickens.”

Lewis’s early love for the church found an outlet at home when he tended to the family’s chickens, his personal “flock.” The book details how he emulated church rituals with the birds. He baptized them, held funerals when they died, and always preached the Gospel to them as if they were people—so much so that his family gave him the nickname “Preacher.”

“In Troy, John Lewis avidly followed the news from Montgomery. ‘I can still say without question that the Montgomery bus boycott changed my life more than any other event before or since,’ Lewis recalled. He read accounts in the editions of The Montgomery Advertiser that his grandfather, who could afford a subscription, passed along to Lewis’s parents, who could not. To Lewis, the boycott was faith in action, the gospel moving from the pulpit to the streets, from theory to reality, from word to deed.”

The Montgomery bus boycott had a profound effect on Lewis in two ways. First, it was coordinated by Martin Luther King, whom he’d heard on the radio and had become a fan of. Second, as the quotation indicates, it was putting faith into action. As much as he loved the church, he found early on that most of the attention was on the otherworldly hereafter, whereas he saw religion’s direct application to the earthly world. King’s sermons and actions, such as the boycott, focused on this world rather than the afterlife.

“To Lewis, the classes with Powell were a revelation. ‘The Holy Hill’ was changing his life. ‘It was at this time that I began believing in what I call the Spirit of History,’ Lewis said. ‘Others might call it Fate. Or Destiny. Or a Guiding Hand. Whatever it is called, I came to believe that this force is on the side of what is good, of what is right and just.’”

“The Spirit of History” is the title of Chapter 2, which covers Lewis’s years as a college student. He and his classmates dubbed the American Baptist Theological Seminary campus “The Holy Hill” because it sat on a hill overlooking Nashville. It was there that he first had the sense of this Spirit, a kind of fate or direction of history that he felt caught up in. The Spirit of History would be with him throughout his life, and at important moments or crossroads on his journey, he often felt that it moved him along unconsciously. In other words, he was meant to be doing that thing at that moment in time, whatever it was, and was guided by this force.

“Yet Lawson’s message to Lewis, and in turn Lewis’s message to America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, turned history on its head. Love, not power, should have pride of place; generosity, not greed; kindness, not cruelty. Nonviolence had its tactical uses, but it was not only a tactic. It was an enveloping philosophy, a compelling cosmology, a transforming reality. ‘We are talking about love here,’ Lewis recalled. ‘Not romantic love. Not the love of one individual for another. Not loving something that is lovely to you. This is broader, deeper, more all-encompassing love. It is a love that accepts and embraces the hateful and the hurtful. It is a love that recognizes the spark of the divine in each of us, even in those who would raise their hand against us, those we might call our enemy.’ Lewis’s nonviolent witness took place in a democratic context, but his vision transcended the familiar understanding of the progressive impulse in America.”

This passage describes Lewis’s philosophy of nonviolence as he learned it from James Lawson. It encompassed Christian love for everyone, which would overcome hate and lead to a better society, one they referred to as the Beloved Community. Note that this love extended to the very people who attacked them during their protests. The ability to see “the spark of the divine” in someone assaulting—and even trying to kill—you is not easy; it speaks to the depth of Lewis’s commitment to nonviolence.

“Connor successfully sought a seat in the state legislature and won his citywide office three years later. He was a devoted defender of Jim Crow, once opposing an integrated meeting in Birmingham in 1938 that included Eleanor Roosevelt and Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. ‘Negroes and whites,’ he said, ‘would not segregate together’ on his watch. A decade later, Connor was a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention. ‘It is part of the Communist program to stir up strife between white and Negro people and keep it stirred up,’ Connor said. ‘It is my hope that, as one of your delegates, I can help roll back the attempt of meddlers, agitators and Communist stooges, to force down our throats, through our own Democratic Party, the bitter dose they are now offering us under the false name of Civil Liberties.’”

In this passage, Meacham describes the early political career of the man known as “Bull” Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who coordinated the official response to the final leg of the Freedom Rides. The passage illustrates his deep and abiding opposition to civil rights and equality for Black Americans, going back to the 1930s and 1940s. A dozen years later, he arrested Lewis and his fellow Freedom Riders when they reached Birmingham, holding them in jail until the middle of the night, when he drove them to the Alabama state border and left them at the side of the road. His words and actions exemplify the open, virulent racism in America at that time.

“In Parchman, Lewis came to a decision. His place was here, on the battlefield of his homeland, not in India. He wrote the American Friends Service Committee to withdraw from the overseas program into which he’d just been accepted. ‘The people who were together at Parchman—we grew up in that time there together,’ Lewis recalled. ‘We grew tougher, we grew wiser.’ Each Freedom Rider was assigned to give a lecture based on his college major. ‘We did a lot of teaching and praying and singing there. We became better souls, more committed to the way of peace and the way of love.’”

Lewis was referring to the prison farm where he and other Freedom Riders were sent when—upon arriving in Jackson, Mississippi—they were arrested. They were sentenced to 60 days in jail and spent most of them at Parchman, a state penitentiary notorious for bad treatment. Rather than letting this experience make him hardened or angry, however, Lewis spoke of growth and a greater commitment to love. This response exemplifies the idea that attaining the Beloved Community involves trial, tribulation, and suffering. While at Parchman, Lewis made the decision to stay in the United States and commit his life to the civil rights movement.

“‘It was hard to keep up with events and emotions at the pace they were tumbling that week,’ Lewis recalled. What the sit-ins and Freedom Rides had set in motion was gaining ferocious, even dizzying, speed, and the forces of fear and hate were taking their stand against hope and love. For Lewis, though, love remained the constant and essential element in the unfolding drama of liberty versus captivity. The sniper’s bullets had to be met not with blows but with gentle resistance; the dogs and fire hoses not with arms but with understanding.”

This quotation concerns the events of June 1963. Governor George Wallace of Alabama made a show of blocking the path of Black students as they attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama, and federal troops directed by the Kennedy administration had to intervene to enforce the students’ right to register. That night, President Kennedy addressed the issue in a nationally televised speech on civil rights, and later that night, NAACP worker Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Mississippi (hence the reference to “sniper’s bullets”). Again, Lewis met these threats and attacks with a belief in the power of love. However, as violence against civil rights workers became more common, not everyone would maintain faith in the power of peaceful resistance.

“Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham? Where is the political party that will protect the citizens of Albany, Georgia? […]

To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.”

This is a quotation from Lewis’s speech at the March on Washington in August 1963. While often seen as a moderate among the leaders in the civil rights movement, here Lewis showed his impatience with continuing to wait for a political solution. Many in the movement thought President Kennedy was moving too slowly and not doing enough for civil rights. In his speech, Lewis returned to this theme of wanting results now, not at some vague time in the future. Keep in mind that this is the amended version of his speech; the event’s organizers persuaded him to tone it down a bit because they thought too fiery a speech would imperil Kennedy’s civil rights legislation in Congress.

“The bombing gave the debate over nonviolence new resonance. What good were the Lawson-taught troops doing, it was asked, when they were fighting with love and the haters were using dynamite? ‘That was always a question during the movement,’ Lewis recalled. ‘After the church bombing—after so many violent episodes, and there were so many, in so many different places, all over the South—people would say, ‘How can nonviolence defeat violence? The Klansmen don’t go to funerals, We’re the ones who go to funerals.’ But we couldn’t give up. Violence was not an option for us—not if we wanted to prevail, not if we wanted the Beloved Community.’”

This passage refers to the KKK bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963. It killed four young girls, ages 11 to 14, and injured more than a dozen others. This event inevitably made people question the movement’s commitment to nonviolence. Attacks on civil rights workers (who willingly put their lives on the line) were one thing, but now innocent children had died. Many wondered how they could not respond, at least in self-defense. As the quotation shows, however, Lewis remained committed to nonviolence as the only solution. It was a stance that would increasingly put him at odds with those in the organization he headed during that time.

“Lewis’s reaction to Kennedy’s death is telling. ‘He was the first American president to say that the issue of civil rights and social justice was a moral issue,’ Lewis recalled. ‘He represented our hope, our idealism, our dreams about what America could become. […] When he died, a light went out in America and the nation has never quite been the same since.’”

As this quotation illustrates, the year 1963 was eventful in the civil rights movement. In November, President Kennedy was assassinated, which was devastating for those in the movement. Many, including Lewis, saw him as the best hope for realizing civil rights legislation; the fact that Lewis’s thoughts about the country were never the same after this assassination shows how affected he was by Kennedy’s death. It left the political leadership in the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Because he was a southerner, some in the movement did not trust him, and his eventual commitment to civil rights surprised many.

“The right to vote—promised in the Fifteenth Amendment but denied before and since—was top of mind as 1963 drew to a close. ‘There will be no revolution until we see Negro faces in all positions that help to mold public opinion, help to shape policy for America,’ James Lawson had written at the time of the founding of SNCC. ‘One federal judge in Mississippi will do more to bring revolution than sending 600 marshals to Alabama. We must never allow the President to substitute marshals for putting people into positions where they can affect public policy.’ As early as 1961, King had said, ‘The central front, however, we feel is that of suffrage. If we in the south can win the right to vote it will place in our hands more than an abstract right. It will give us the concrete tool with which we ourselves can correct injustice.’ It fell to Lewis to make the abstract real.”

This passage reflects the shift in the civil rights movement from the fight against segregation to the struggle for voting rights, which dominated Lewis’s work in the mid-1960s. As both Lawson and King noted, voting would help the cause of justice by not just relying on the goodwill of others to pass laws and enforce them but by allowing African Americans to elect their own to positions of power so that they could access the political tools necessary to gain equal rights.

“Nothing about the politics of 1964, however, mattered more to John Lewis, then or later, than what happened at the Democratic convention on the Jersey Shore. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ Lewis recalled, Atlantic City ‘was the turning point of the civil rights movement. I’m absolutely convinced of that. Until then, despite every setback and disappointment and obstacle we had faced over the years, the belief still prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen, the system would respond. Now, for the first time, we had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.’”

This quotation refers to the controversy over the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in August 1964. As part of Freedom Summer that year, civil rights workers established a new political party called the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Because segregationists and white supremacists controlled the state’s official Democratic Party, Lewis and his colleagues thought that it should not represent the state at the convention. The MFDP sent an integrated group of delegates hoping to gain recognition. The thinking was that President Johnson was on their side in the civil rights struggle, so surely he would not side with the all-white segregationist delegates. Johnson, however, surprised them by doing just that, in part because he believed that backing the MFDP would weaken him in southern states in the general election. He prevented the MFDP delegates from being seated, and Lewis and his colleagues felt betrayed.

“Lewis thought the debate missed the larger point—and to him the larger point was that tribulation was a necessary precursor to the Beloved Community. There could be no crown without the cross, no Easter without Good Friday. That’s the way things were. ‘If these people want to march, I’m going to march with them,’ he told the skeptics within SNCC. ‘You decide what you want to do, but I’m going to march.’ To Bernard LaFayette, Lewis’s resolve was impressive. ‘John went against his own constituency, his own group, because he thought it was the right thing to do,’ LaFayette recalled. ‘He said he would march as John Lewis, not as the chairman of SNCC. His conscience was more important to him than the power struggles, I guess you would call it, that could happen in the movement.’”

This passage concerns the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, that Lewis became famous for leading. Martin Luther King proposed the march to highlight the need for a voting rights bill. The SNCC, the organization Lewis led, was against it and decided not to participate. After what happened at the Democratic convention the previous summer, people had lost faith in the political process, and many thought a march would unnecessarily provoke more violence. Lewis, out of step with his own organization, joined the march. Violence did occur, but it helped garner support for the passage of the Voting Rights Act that summer. The next year, however, Lewis was voted out as chairman of the SNCC.

“At this moment on Highway 80, in the Deep South of a Cold War America unchanged in so many ways from Civil War America, John Lewis’s life reached a kind of crescendo. He was still so young—he had turned twenty-five two weeks before—and yet there on that strip of road he was like a martyr or a prophet of old. For all the complexities of race and identity and power and love and hate, for all the dreams fulfilled and dreams deferred, for all the panoply and pain of history, this much, at least, was simple at that hour and that place in Selma: The forces of good were pitted against the forces of evil. The marchers were asking a nation to live up to its word that all were created equal, and the nation, in the form of those troopers and deputies and demonstrators, was saying, as Sheriff Clark’s lapel pin put it, ‘Never.’”

Meacham’s description of the key moment of the Selma-to-Montgomery march serves as his analysis to frame the narrative. He has just described the beginning of the march as the marchers reached the Edmund Pettis Bridge and spotted the line of state troopers blocking the road on the other side. Meacham stops the narrative briefly to point out the significance of that moment—and the moral clarity it provided. The peaceful marchers were about to be assaulted and tear-gassed with no provocation. In this clear-cut case of good versus evil, Lewis and his colleagues were on the side of good, ultimately changing the nation by prodding it to live up to its creed.

“As far as Lewis was concerned, however, the work could only stop with the coming of the Kingdom, of the Beloved Community. To him, harmony and justice were closer to hand after Selma but were still out of reach for too many. He left Washington for the South, arriving in Americus, Georgia, where county officials were insisting on segregated voter-registration lines. So it was that he was in police custody within forty-eight hours of conferring personally with the president of the United States.

He’d been to the mountaintop. Selma had changed America; he had talked things over with the president; he was a national figure. Yet here he was, back in jail, back among the least of these. And he was at peace. ‘Along the way I had what I call an executive session with myself,’ Lewis recalled. ‘I said, “I’m not going to hate. I’m not going to become bitter. I’m not going to live a hostile life. I’m going to treat my fellow human being as a human being.” So when I was being beaten on the Freedom Rides or in a march, I never hated. I respected the dignity and the worth of that person. Because we all are human and we must be human toward each other and love each other.’”

This passage illustrates two of Lewis’s signature qualities. The first is his abiding commitment to Christian love and nonviolence: To love in the face of hate and personal attack took a strength of character that even his detractors respected. The second is his persistence: He kept working until the job was finished—and because the job was never really finished, he never stopped working. Fresh from a meeting at the White House, he was back in the trenches working for equal rights—and in jail less than two days later. Whatever personal heights he reached, they took a back seat to the fight for justice.

“Lewis understood the basic question. ‘Now that we had secured our bedrock, fundamental rights—the rights of access and accommodation and the right to vote—the movement was moving into a new phase, a far stickier and more complex stage of gaining equal footing in this society,’ he recalled after Selma. ‘The problem we faced now was not something so visible or easily identifiable as a Bull Connor blocking our way. Now we needed to deal with the subtler and much more complex issues of attaining economic and political power, of dealing with attitudes and actions held deep inside people and institutions that, now that they were forced to let us through the door, could still keep the rewards inside those doors out of our reach.’”

Lewis was alluding to the movement’s simplicity in its early days. Sit-ins to protest segregated lunch counters and voter registration campaigns shed light on obvious wrongs that could be righted. Attaining justice in the more complex situations that arose as time went on was more difficult. As he noted in the passage, a law could force organizations and institutions to accept Black people—but changing the beliefs and behavior of white people was not as easy. If they wanted to create barriers for African Americans in such contexts, those barriers would be harder to prove and remedy.

“In movement circles, the Jim Lawson curriculum of the Bible, Thoreau, Niebuhr, Gandhi, and King was being displaced by a 1961 account of the independence struggle in Algiers, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. ‘Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a preface to Fanon’s book. ‘But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.’”

This passage highlights the push and pull within the civil rights movement in the 1960s between the opposing paths of nonviolent resistance and a more aggressive stance. As the decade went on, the Lawson-King-Lewis approach of passive resistance lost credence with many civil rights workers, and groups advocating Black Power and even armed confrontation (as the Black Panther Party did) gained popularity.

“The violence in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, and elsewhere, Carmichael told readers of The New York Review of Books in September 1966, came in part because ‘each time the people in those cities saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death, they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build their frustration.’”

Stokely Carmichael was an associate of Lewis’s at the SNCC and succeeded him as chairman. Carmichael was one of the leaders who became disillusioned with passive resistance and advocated a stronger approach. This quotation reveals that he even saw the SNCC’s nonviolent approach as part of what led to the riots in the cities he mentioned. He posed the issue in clear and blunt terms, arguing that doing nothing in response to the murder of children only builds anger and frustration—emotions for which the riots were simply a natural outlet. It’s a concrete explanation for why Carmichael and others turned away from the philosophy of nonviolence.

“In Atlanta, Lewis escorted Ethel and Robert Kennedy into Ebenezer Church to view King’s open casket. It was late, the middle of the night; the sanctuary was illuminated by candlelight. The Kennedys made the sign of the cross; Lewis’s mind ranged widely, and deeply. ‘Dr. King was my friend, my brother, my leader,’ he recalled. ‘He was the man, the one who opened my eyes to the world. From the time I was fifteen until the day he died—for almost half my life—he was the person who, more than any other, continued to influence my life, who made me who I was. He made me who I am.’”

This passage, which Meacham quotes from Lewis’s memoir, shows how close Lewis was to Martin Luther King and the devastating effect King’s death had on him. Lewis first met King when he was an 18-year-old college student, and over the next 10 years they worked closely together as the leaders of their respective organizations. The 1960s took a heavy toll on leaders who were able to make a positive difference. First came the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Now King’s assassination robbed the movement of his inestimable abilities (and Robert Kennedy’s assassination would follow only two months later). Lewis worked on the younger Kennedy’s presidential campaign and came to see him as another shining light capable of making positive changes for civil rights.

“This is history. And history honors the marchers at Selma, not the mounted possemen; the children of Birmingham, not Bull Connor. In a survey conducted by Gallup at the turn of the millennium, the American public ranked the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the fifth most important event of the twentieth century, outranked only by World War II, women’s suffrage, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The civil rights legislation was seen as more significant than World War I, the landing of men on the moon, the assassination of President Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Great Depression. The Voting Rights Act empowered African American voters throughout the South, bringing millions of previously excluded people into full citizenship.”

In the Epilogue, Meacham returns to the case he made in the Overture about Lewis’s importance in American history (see Quotation 1). The legislation that passed in the 1960s, which owed a great debt to the efforts of Lewis and his colleagues, changed the nation. The survey from which Meacham quotes in this passage lends perspective to just how important this legislation was to Americans.