John Lewis: American Hero, a Profile in Courage
The times we are about to live in…
Rep. John Lewis is a Congressman representing the Georgia 5th District, which includes much of Atlanta, Fulton County, one of the most affluent African American communities in the country, next to Prince George’s County, Maryland. He has been a member of Congress since first being elected in 1987, currently serving as the Dean of the Georgia delegation and Sr. Chief Deputy Whip in the U.S. House of Representatives.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2015), African Americans comprise 44.3% or nearly 448,000 of the 1,010,562 residents of Fulton County, GA. Those who are age 25+ and high school graduates or higher are 90.9% of the county’s population, while those with at least a bachelor’s degree comprise 49.3% of the county’s residents.
Median household incomes for the county is $57,207; the county’s individual per capita income is $37,926. All of these figures, which are higher than that of the U.S. population in general and many of the red states who voted for Donald Trump, debunk a statement made via social media on January 14, 2017 that, “Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to……mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad! Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!”
So why is a Congressman representing the 5th Congressional District in Georgia significant and worthy of an asinine Twitter attack from our incoming Twit-in-Chief? Because Congressman Lewis had the audacity to refer to President (elect) Trump’s election as illegitimate, which in today’s world is a sure-fire way to draw the dog-seeking-squirrel like attention the soon Chief plans to bring to the Office of the President.
Before John Lewis became a representative in Congress, John Lewis was a graduate fresh from Fisk University in Tennessee and an idealistic 23 year-old who in 1963 took leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC was an important organizing group for the civil rights movement. As head of SNCC, Lewis was the youngest member of the “Big Six,” a term used to describe those civil rights leaders closest to Dr. King, including James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, Bayard Rustin, a close King adviser, and A. Philip Randolph, an early civil rights leader and head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Rep. Lewis is an icon of the movement. For those of you too young to know what the movement was about or have had it conveniently edited out of your history book by a Tea-Party controlled local school board as incendiary, ala the Nazis throwing prominent works of literature into bonfires during the 1930s, it was a movement that began in the mid-1950s, starting with the defiant actions of a seamstress named Rosa Parks who refused to give up her front seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, AL on December 1, 1955.
After her arrest, a 26 year-old pastor named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. helped form and became leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and, in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, led nonviolent civil protests in the South geared toward guaranteeing the full protections of freedoms of the U.S. Constitution for African Americans, many of whom were disenfranchised by segregationist Jim Crow laws born out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) decision. It was the Plessy decision that established the “separate but equal” doctrine as justification for the separation of races in this country and the loathsome miscegenation laws that kept whites and blacks from marrying or cohabitating with one another.
[Such laws were struck down by a series of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, notably, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which integrated the school houses across the country from Topeka, KS to Walla Walla, Washington, and the Loving v. Virginia (1967) decision, which struck down the miscegenation laws.]
Lewis was young yet a first hand witness to historic events of a magnitude beyond description from his early to late twenties. He helped to organize and participated in the famous 1963 March on Washington, merely steps away from King as he delivered the historic “I Have a Dream” speech. He spoke truth to power and challenged SCLC leadership to support the Freedom Rides, a series of dangerous interstate bus rides in 1963–64 into the depths of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, to fight segregation and discrimination in interstate travel.
He stood in the room as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation that overturned much of the ill effects of Plessy and other rulings that slowly and over time disenfranchised African-Americans and returned blacks to a position in society subordinate to whites, particularly in the South but not unfound in the Northern urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, etc.
As an organizer of the famous March to Selma (Alabama) in 1965, Lewis was captured in what can be thought of as a defining moment of the struggle for equality in the United States. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, a day that has come to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday,’ 600 peaceful marchers attempted to cross over the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, en route to a rally in Dallas County, AL for a voter registration rally to be led by Dr. King.
As the marchers came in view, a confrontation, well actually, a one-sided slaughter of innocents ensued, brought on by billy club wielding maniacs shielded under the cover of law and repressive racial brutality. Of the victims who merely sought cover from the relentless blows dealt by immoral cowards disguised as men, Lewis would be severely beaten, captured in a photo seen around the world, resulting in a cracked skull.
The events of the Bloody Sunday that would capture a nation’s attention and propel a battered, emerging 25 year-old civil rights leader into the limelight and confer a leadership stature that continues to define him today by Congressional colleagues from both sides of the aisle, include former Congressman Mike Pence, R-Indiana, who would later become Indiana Governor and Vice-President of the United States. It was Pence who remarked once in 2010 that Lewis, his friend, was, “an integral part of the American story in our nation’s unrelenting march toward a more perfect union.”.
The events of this historic day were captured by the band U2 in their song of the same title:
Yeah
Hmm hmm
I can’t believe the news today
Oh, I can’t close my eyes
And make it go away
How long
How long must we sing this song?
How long? How long
’cause tonight we can be as one
Tonight
Broken bottles under children’s feet
Bodies strewn across the dead end street
But I won’t heed the battle call
It puts my back up
Puts my back up against the wall
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday
And the battle’s just begun
There’s many lost, but tell me who has won?
The trench is dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday
How long
How long must we sing this song?
How long? How long
’cause tonight we can be as one
Tonight tonight
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Wipe the tears from your eyes
Wipe your tears away
Oh, wipe your tears away
I wipe your tears away
(Sunday, bloody Sunday)
I wipe your blood shot eyes
(Sunday, bloody Sunday)
Sunday, bloody Sunday (Sunday, bloody Sunday)
Sunday, bloody Sunday (Sunday, bloody Sunday)
And it’s true we are immune
When fact is fiction and TV reality
And today the millions cry
We eat and drink while tomorrow they die
The real battle just begun
To claim the victory Jesus won
On
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Sunday, bloody Sunday
Rhetoric, for anyone who has studied it, is words that have meaning. Powerful, emotional, impactful, visceral meaning. A person assuming the mantle of leadership of the greatest office in this country should know the force and power of the words they speak. A President’s words sway opinion, move financial markets up and down, signal war, and forge lasting peace, both at home and abroad.
It is unfathomable that those closest to the incoming Chief have not had talks ad nauseam to hammer home the point that words matter. To engage in a social media attack of a man whose substance and character are above reproach, who has served the interests of his country far longer than any of those proposed leaders destined to lead the nation in the new administration is not only beneath the honor of the Office of President, it is beneath its dignity as well.
Although symptomatic of a thin-skinned narcissistic egotist, who craves constant validation and attention above all else, such an attack must never stand or be acknowledged as legitimate, even for one who quite frankly is the illegitimate benefactor of a system that rewarded the very least effort of us the populace and will require the very most to undo when four years have run their course.
Appealing to an uncaring and rabidly racist core group of agitators to score electoral college votes in the general election is one thing. Politics is an ugly bloodsport from which only the strong emerges victorious. But, upon securing victory, a conciliatory air of contrition, humility, and bipartisanship must take hold in order for everyone to come together and work united toward a common good, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Taking to social media in a knee-jerk, sophomoric, and puerile way to chastise opponents, brag about unrealized accomplishments, or simply to spread falsehoods and discredit iconic individuals whose accomplishments are etched in history, validated by the blood they personally shed to truly “Make America Great,” is not an American value; it is the value of the despots and dictators we have sacrificed our blood and lives over 241 years in this sometimes most imperfect union.
If you don’t believe that we are a nation divided, if you do not see the danger in distorted rhetoric and the rewriting of history to suit a particular ideological narrative, if you do not understand the power of words, spoken and written, to the masses and disseminated in a harmful manner, well I have a bridge to sell to you. It’s in Selma, Alabama.
