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John Lewis Was an American Founder
Without activists like Lewis and C. T. Vivian, America would remain a white republic, not a nation for all its citizens
The Alabama that John Lewis was born into in 1940 was a one-party authoritarian state. Forty years before Lewis was born, the white elite of Alabama, panicked by a populist revolt of white and Black workers, shut Black men out of politics in a campaign of terror, fraud, murder, and, finally, disenfranchisement.
“We had to do it. Unfortunately, I say it was a necessity. We could not help ourselves,” Alabama Governor William C. Oates confessed. In 1901, the Montgomery Advertiser announced that with the new state constitution, “the putrid sore of negro suffrage is severed from the body of the commonwealth.” Such wholesale purges of Black Americans from the polity unfolded throughout the South, where the Democratic Party established a system of implacable white supremacy.
Most of America’s Black population, when Lewis was born, lived in a white republic, where they were driven into poverty, disenfranchised, and denied basic civil and political rights through violence, custom, and law. More than one-third of Alabama’s population when Lewis was born was denied the right to vote.
