John Lewis Is Still Alive
This is not an obituary. John Lewis is still alive.
Congressman Lewis, a man that not nearly enough Americans know of, has been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The diagnosis comes at an awful and dire moment in this country’s narrative. But every moment is a dire one in America’s history just as every moment is an awful one to receive such a diagnosis. John Lewis knows that better than most.
Born in 1940, Lewis came of age during the Civil Rights movement. The movement shaped the future of America. Lewis shaped the movement. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he helped plan the March on Washington which was highlighted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Lewis also delivered a speech at that event, calling for the proposed Civil Rights Act to incorporate promises of higher wages for sharecroppers and protections against police brutality. He decried that the proposed bill did not secure voting rights for “thousands of black people who want to vote.” He would later be beaten nearly to death while marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama for those same voting rights. He was an original Freedom Rider, an organizer of student sit-ins, and indefatigable demonstrator. The National Civil Rights Museum is replete with images, quotes, and recordings of a young John Lewis, showing wisdom and courage well beyond his age.
Throughout the struggle, Lewis passionately denounced the opposition who told him and his colleagues to be patient as they strove for their freedom. “How long can we be patient?” he asked in 1963. Today, workers still toil for less than the living wage. Police brutality, doled out in an undeniably racist manner, persists. Hundreds of thousands of voters, overwhelmingly individuals of color, are stripped of their voting rights in Wisconsin, Florida, and Lewis’s own state of Georgia. And still, 56 years after his speech in Washington, Lewis is forced to remain patient.
The true story of American progress, as seen through John Lewis’s eyes, is begrudgingly slow, halting, and painful. This story extends back well before Lewis. Ta-Nehisi Coates has pinpointed the ways in which progress following the Civil War was actively obstructed by the forces of white supremacy. Recently, Nikole Hannah-Jones reached back to the days that the first slave ships arrived in America and compiled the powerful 1619 Project, detailing how regardless of any progress made since then, “no aspect of the country…formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery.”
But this is not what we are taught. Our history classes and textbooks present a steady feel-good narrative of consistent enlightenment and moral advancements that ranges from “specious interpretations” to outright denialism. The brutality of slavery is often glossed over as an economic necessity or an artifact of the time. The fact that this country was literally split into two warring nations over the desire to preserve this inhumane institution is downplayed to the point of dismissal. The failures of Reconstruction are presented largely as an afterthought and the Civil Rights movement is seen as a conclusion in which racism and all the destruction it has wrought are literally relegated to the pages of history.
It is in the context of John Lewis that this erasure becomes so clear. We are taught the names of martyrs. The average high school student can likely name Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks as being important leaders during the Civil Rights movement. But John Lewis, a leader who stood shoulder to shoulder with these giants, did not merit a mention in my high school US History textbook and I doubt he was mentioned in yours. And in my mind, the reason for this is clear.
If you include John Lewis in this narrative of history, if you display the images of John Lewis beaten and bloodied on that bridge in Selma alongside his present-day official Congressional portraits, if you tell students that the same John Lewis who fought for civil rights in the 1960s is still alive and fighting for many of those same rights today, you shatter the comforting illusion of a post-racial America.
Forgetting John Lewis is crucial to manufacturing the belief that racism and white supremacy are things of the past because his scars embody the reality that America would like to deny. The white supremacy of Reconstruction is still alive. Slavery’s brutal exploitation of labor, coupled with a racist stratification of society, is still alive. The injustice of voter suppression and segregation that sparked the Civil Rights Movement is still alive. John Lewis is still alive and so too are the ideas and individuals that nearly killed him half a century ago.
This is not an obituary. This is an exhortation to not only appreciate an American hero while he is still with us but to understand what it means that such a hero is never done fighting. I had the incredible fortune of running into Congressman Lewis last year and I would love to say that we had an insightful or meaningful conversation. But the reality is, I was starstruck and tongue-tied and he had already told us so much that we need to know about the history and present reality of racial inequality in America through his actions. We cannot ignore that history. We cannot deny that reality. We cannot forget John Lewis.
