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

As the subject of this partial biography, Lewis is the book’s main figure. He was born in Alabama in 1940 and grew up on a farm with his parents and nine siblings. A serious young man from an early age, he drew inspiration from the religion he found at two local churches he attended. Meacham describes how Lewis emulated the role of minister back on the farm in taking care of the family’s chickens (his “flock”). He practiced preaching to them and held baptisms and funerals. This interest in religion was the foundation for his philosophy in the civil rights movement and later in his life, and it also led him to attend a Baptist seminary for college.

At the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Lewis put his religiosity into practice as he learned about the peaceful, passive resistance strategies of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He soon joined some of the activities of the burgeoning civil rights movement to try to desegregate facilities in the South. He had become acutely aware of racial discrimination early on in his home state and, at age 11, learned about a different way of life when his uncle took him on a trip to the integrated city of Buffalo, New York. As a teenager, he’d heard King on the radio and became a big fan. Now he wanted to emulate his hero as he participated sit-ins to promote the integration of lunch counters in Nashville. He also participated in the Freedom Rides in 1961 from Washington, DC, to Mississippi; in fact, Lewis and a group of nine others kept them going when violence threatened to end them early.

In 1963, he was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was one of the main organizers of the March on Washington that August. In 1964, he helped coordinate Freedom Summer, a drive to register Black voters in Mississippi. In March 1965, he co-led the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in which peaceful marchers were brutally attacked by police on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The fallout from this incident helped the Johnson administration pass the Voting Rights Act that summer. The following year, Lewis lost an election to continue as leader of the SNCC and then spent a year working in New York. In 1968, he returned to Atlanta, Georgia, where he resided for the rest of his life. He won a seat in the House of Representatives in 1986, which he held until his death in 2020.

Throughout his life, Lewis adhered to the principles of nonviolence and peaceful demonstration to effect social change. He eschewed separatist and Black Power strategies that became popular in the movement after the mid-1960s. He never stopped believing in Martin Luther King’s vision of the Beloved Community, in which all Americans live together in community and love, respecting and protecting each other’s rights. Meacham argues that Lewis was tremendously influential, especially insofar as his work directly impacted the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The author goes further, calling Lewis a saint because his Christian beliefs were in close “harmony with the ideals of God” (6) and he was willing to put his life on the line for others—not just once but over and over again.