Walking for Freedom: John Lewis

Our 3-month summer road trip ends today in our nation’s capitol, where tens of thousands of folks are marching in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  One marcher is Rep. John Lewis, for over 25 years a Congressional Representative from Georgia.  In 1963, at age 23, he was the younges of the six key civil rights organizers of the historic march and today he is the only still living. 

On these last two weeks of our road trip we’ve finally gotten out of our cars and off the road to honor two great American long distance walkers named John. Last week was Johnny Appleseed.  This week we could call our walker John Freedomseed.

John LewisAlabama state troopers bashed in John Lewis’s skull on March 7, 1965.  They had ordered him and hundreds others to stop their civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.  The marchers, trained in non-violence by Martin Luther King, Jr., responded by kneeling in prayer.  The march was halted by the bloody standoff.

John Lewis was then 25 years old.  He’d already been walking and working for freedom for half his life.  Child of sharecroppers in a small segregated Alabama town, he first became aware of the civil rights movement at age 16 when he read a comic book about Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and nonviolent protest. 

A comic book?  Yes, “Martin Luther King and the Road to Montgomery: How 50,000 Negroes found a new way to end racial discrimination,” 10 cents.  Published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1956, it was a comic book for adults.  Easy to read but illegal to own, it was surreptitiously spread around the South, telling the story of the then also young (then 27) civil rights organizer’s lunch counter sit-ins.

John Lewis in the Foreground Being AttractedA few years later Lewis was in college, where he joined the interracial Freedom Riders to travel the South protesting segregation and registering voters.  He was jailed 24 times.  Eventually he became president of the national Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, which was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. 

Lewis was the youngest speaker on the platform that day, August 28, 1963, 23 years old, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial next to such civil rights giants as A. Phillip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.

He had prepared a young man’s fiery speech, denouncing the federal government for being timid and slow to grant civil rights to all citizens, talking about the need for “revolution” and threatening bolder action.  The organizers knew that President Kennedy was wary of the march, but was working for civil rights legislation behind the scenes.  Lewis was planning to denounce Kennedy’s bill as “too little, too late.”  Fearing Lewis’ rhetoric would scare Kennedy and other whites, march organizers enlisted Patrick Cardinal Boyle, first Archbishop of Washington DC, a civil rights activist who had ordered all parochial school desegregated years before the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on desegregation, to help them get Lewis to tone it down just a bit.  He finally agreed.  But just in case, black security guards stood next to Lewis on stage, ready to turn off the mike if he went off script.  Today, his original words, and the changes seem minor, but the back story reminds us of the complexity and power of words and context. 

Two years later, in 1965, when those state troopers bashed in his skull on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, John Lewis might have been thinking of those other guards slowing his fiery passion.  But ultimately neither billy clubs nor firehoses nor separate entrances nor white troopers nor black security guards could stop Lewis and the civil rights marchers.  Two weeks after that March 7, 1965 skull bashing, John Lewis was out of the hospital and helping to resume the march, now granted a permit and police protection. 

Once again a walker, he journeyed 10 miles a day, for five days. March 25 they finally completed the journey from Selma to the state capitol, by this time leading 25,000 other folks.  Then-President Lyndon Johnson saw that 1965 March on TV, and, braver than his predecessor Kennedy, he introduced Civil Rights legislation the next day.

John Lewis hasn’t stopped walking.  At the 50^th anniversary commemoration this weekend he urged the crowd, “You cannot stand by.  You cannot sit down. You have to stand up, speak up, speak out and get in the way.  Make some noise.  The vote is precious.  It is almost sacred.  It’s the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society and we’ve got to use it….So hang in there, keep the faith.  I was arrested 40 times in the 60’s, beaten, bloodied and unconscious.  I’m not tired.  I’m not weary.  I’m not prepared to sit down and give up.”

This month a new comic book educates and inspires another generation of Americans.  March: Book One is a graphic novel by Lewis and two associates, the first of a trilogy about the ups and downs of the civil rights movement as told by his life.  Lewis says that as proud as he is to serve his district, and to have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he is totally amazed at being the subject of a comic book.  But he hopes it might do for others what the 1956 story of King did for him.

John Lewis has the skull scars and the weary feet to prove his persistence.  Keep walking, John.  Keep walking, America.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter