Throughout the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of the past weeks, his name was evoked by activists and news anchors. His message of nonviolence has been conveyed repeatedly—in a powerful new documentary and several recent children’s books. Indeed, over this past weekend, politicians called for his name to be affixed to the Voting Rights Act and even to the Edmund Pettus Bridge itself—the historic span, across the Alabama River, where Lewis was clubbed and bloodied 55 years ago.
John Lewis, in life and in death, has been everywhere lately. Even as I write this, an authorized biography of the widely revered civil rights activist and U.S. congressman from Georgia is being rushed to print. The book, His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope, by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham, contains an incident that perfectly encapsulates the modest, exemplary character of Lewis, who died Friday after a battle with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
The date was August 28, 1963. The setting was the White House, where Martin Luther King Jr. and a group of civil rights leaders—a 23-year-old John Lewis among them—were meeting with President John F. Kennedy. At one point when photographs were being taken, Lewis was hidden in the back. James Forman—a colleague of Lewis’s on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—often urged Lewis, a protégé of Dr. King’s and a rising voice in the movement for racial justice, to push his way to the front in situations like this. Lewis quietly refused. He later explained why. “I’ve never been the kind of person who naturally attracts the limelight,” he said. “I’m not a handsome guy. I’m not flamboyant. I’m not what you would call elegant. I’m short and stocky. My skin is dark, not fair…For some or all of these reasons, I simply have never been the kind of guy who draws attention.”
The breadth and richness of his 80-year life journey belie the absurdity of such a statement. For, if nothing else, John Lewis over the decades would become famous for drawing attention, for placing his imprint on the narrative of this country, an imprint that is deeply entrenched and has been continually discovered and rediscovered by each generation.
The 17-term congressman represented a district in the Atlanta metropolitan area from 1987 until his death. But it is what Lewis did as a young man that cemented his legacy and lore. His stoicism in the face of brutal, racist attacks in his home state of Alabama—and in scores of small towns and cities throughout the South—and his discipline coupled with nonviolence, as he defined it, led to achieving what his mentor, Dr. King, called the “beloved community.”
Often labeled the “conscience of the Congress” for his unwavering moral compass, Lewis, even at 5’6”, always stood large. Arrested 45 times—including five while in Congress—he was deeply rooted in his Christian faith and possessed an unwavering adherence to the principles of nonviolence that he learned from Reverend James Lawson as a Nashville seminary student. Lewis’s senior sermon, derived from the Book of Matthew, drew a clear line underscoring the mission he and fellow students were committed to seeing through just before launching sit-ins at lunch counters at the dawn of the 1960s. “Think not that I am come to send peace on Earth,” Lewis preached, citing Matthew. “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Lewis would describe that long-ago sermon to Meacham this way: “We were going to tear down the old world—patiently, and nonviolently.”
The Meacham biography, along with Good Trouble, a new CNN documentary directed by Dawn Porter, now viewable on Amazon, are the most recent examinations of Lewis, part of a larger collection of memoirs, historical books, movies, and songs. A graphic nonfiction work, March, which Lewis coauthored for young readers, secured him a 2016 National Book Award. On Saturday the children’s picture book Preaching to the Chickens: The Story of Young John Lewis climbed near the top of Amazon’s best seller charts. Ava DuVernay’s 2014 film, Selma, in which actor Stephan James portrays a young Lewis, has seen a surge in streamings during the summer demonstrations.