JOHN LEWIS

John Lewis was born in Pike County, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, and attended segregated public schools. Inspired by the activism surrounding the Montgomery bus boycott and the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., he joined the civil rights movement. He organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee; was a Freedom Rider; and was beaten and arrested.

From 1963 to 1966, he was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped form. At the age of twenty-three, he was an architect of and a keynote speaker at the March on Washington in August 1963.

In 1964, he coordinated SNCC’s efforts to organize voter-registration drives and community-action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer. The following year, he led over six hundred peaceful, orderly protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on a march to Montgomery for voting rights. News broadcasts and photographs of brutal attacks on the marchers by Alabama state troopers exposed the cruel reality of the segregated South and hastened the passage of the US Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Lewis has been awarded over fifty honorary degrees from prestigious colleges and universities throughout the United States, and has received numerous awards from eminent national and international institutions, including America’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Serving as a US representative from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since 1986, he is known as “the conscience of the Congress.”

Each March, Congressman Lewis leads a delegation to visit civil rights sites in Alabama, organized by The Faith and Politics Institute. I’ve joined several delegations, and Congressman Lewis joined twenty-three RFK family members for the fiftieth anniversary of my father’s visit to South Africa in 2016.

Kerry Kennedy: John, I’m talking to people about my father and why people value his example today. You’re one of the few people in the book who actually knew him, so I wanted to talk to you about that.

John Lewis: I didn’t know him in 1961, but he helped me out of a jam. I’ll tell you how that happened.

The Congress for Racial Equality created something called the Freedom Rides, and I applied to be one of the Freedom Riders. Thirteen of us were selected, seven African Americans and six whites. At our orientation in Washington, DC, we went over the way of peace, the way of love, and the way of nonviolence. We were going to violate laws against integration, and it would be dangerous. Some of us wrote letters, like wills, just in case something really bad happened to us.

On the morning of May 4, some of us boarded a Greyhound bus and others boarded a Trailways bus, and we headed south. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, my seatmate and I attempted to get into a whites-only waiting room. A group of men attacked us—they were Klansmen—and left us in a pool of blood. The police came and asked if we wanted to press charges, but we said no.

The buses continued through Georgia. Between Atlanta and Birmingham, in a little town called Anninston, Alabama, there was an attempt to burn people on the Greyhound bus. The bus was fire-bombed. The people on the Trailways bus were beaten in downtown Birmingham. CORE suspended the rides; they felt they were too dangerous. The US attorney general, Robert Kennedy, suggested there should be a cooling-off period. James Farmer, the head of CORE, said, “You know, Mr. Attorney General, if we cool off any more we’ll be in a deep freeze.” I went back to Nashville, where we organized another group to start off where the first group had left off. Ten of us left Nashville on Wednesday, May 17.

Our bus reached the outskirts of Birmingham. Bull Connor, the police commissioner, had heard we were coming. He stopped us and said, “Let me see your tickets.” Our tickets showed our next stop was Montgomery. Connor ordered the Greyhound driver to drive the bus into the downtown Greyhound station and ordered all of the Freedom Riders to stay on the bus. Two hours later he brought police officials to put cardboard and newspaper on the window so reporters and news media couldn’t see what was happening.

They put us in protective custody, and we stayed in jail until Friday morning. At four a.m. they drove us to the Alabama-Tennessee state line and dumped us out of the car. We didn’t know what was going to happen; a black family took us in. We made a call to Nashville and they sent a car to take us there, but we said we wanted to drive back to Birmingham and continue on by bus to Montgomery. Every time the loudspeaker in Birmingham would announce a bus going from Birmingham to Montgomery, the bus driver would refuse to drive the bus.

One time we tried to go on the bus, and the bus driver said: “I only got one life to live, and I’m not gonna give it to CORE or the NAACP.” Robert Kennedy was very interested in us getting out of Birmingham. He thought it was too dangerous for us to stay there, and at one point he got so desperate he said, “Well, let me speak to Mr. Greyhound.” He thought that there would be black bus drivers willing to drive the bus. Eventually they made an arrangement with the Greyhound company for the bus to leave at eight thirty on Saturday morning, May 20. There would be a plane flying over the bus, and every fifteen miles there would be a patrol car. Every now and then on the ride you’d look out the window and see a patrol car or the plane.

When we arrived in downtown Montgomery, an angry mob appeared out of nowhere and started beating members of the press. If you had cameras or pad and pencil in those days you were danger. We saw reporters and photographers just lying on the street bleeding. Then they turned on us. Several of us were hurt; some were hospitalized. It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was beaten unconscious.

KK: The next evening, The Freedom Riders and 1500 others, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gathered at the First Baptist Church. A white supremacist mob 3000 strong gathered outside, and threw bricks, Molotov cocktails and stink bombs. Tear gas filled the church.

JL: Your father and President Kennedy called out the Alabama National Guard. If it wasn’t for your father, Kerry, I don’t know if I would be sitting here today.

In the end, the Freedom Rides helped bring about desegregation of public transportation all through the South, but it was a long struggle.

Now I’ll take you a little further along, to 1963. We had a campaign going on in Cambridge, Maryland. It was headed by a young woman by the name of Gloria Richardson, who was a great leader most people don’t remember today. We had sit-ins at movie theaters, bowling alleys, and restaurants, and we were focused on economic rights; we wanted better wages and jobs. This had been going for several years and, in 1963, we had a big riot there, in June. There was martial law and they sent in the National Guard. In July, Robert Kennedy called us to come to Washington, and we went to the attorney general’s office. He invited the head of the National Guard to come—the governor of Maryland had already sent four hundred National Guardsmen into Cambridge to halt the disorder and violence—and several local people came from the community, and Gloria Richardson and me. At that time I was chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Robert Kennedy wanted an update on everything that was going on in Cambridge. He was very interested in that fight, so we told him everything that was happening. He kept saying to us that we could solve the problem in Cambridge by giving the people a chance to negotiate, to work it out, because people were afraid there was going to be more serious violence in that part of the eastern shore of Maryland.

At one point during a break in the meetings, he called me aside and said, “John, now I understand. The young people, the students have educated me. You have changed me.” That was something that amazed me. Your father was a quick learner—he understood the issues, he identified with the people and their needs. He was a fair referee, but he also went with his passion and his heart.

Gloria Richardson and the others agreed to what they called the “Treaty of Cambridge.” Gloria wasn’t too happy about it; she didn’t trust that the local officials would hold up their side of the agreement on everything, and they didn’t. Some parts of the agreement we made held, and eventually it led to school desegregation and also to desegregation of the buses and the library and the hospital in Cambridge. But the demonstrations and conflicts continued until the civil rights bills were passed in ’64, ’65, and ’66.

When Robert Kennedy started the whole effort in Brooklyn, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, he came by once to meet with the folks at the Field Foundation in Manhattan, which supported a lot of activism for the voting rights bill and other civil rights efforts. I was working there when he came over, and I met him, but it was really in 1968 that I got to know him better.

During the ’68 campaign, I was working in Indianapolis.

When your father first announced—it was on a Saturday, March 16, I believe—I sent a telegram to him that said, “I want to help. What can I do?” He asked someone to contact me, and the message was that he wanted me to go to Indiana to work in voter registration and to help organize the community. I went there, and I was working with Earl Graves, who was on his staff, and several other people, doing voter registration and setting up meetings. On the night of April 4, we had organized this rally in a transition neighborhood of Indianapolis. There were debates about whether Bobby should come and speak, and I was one of the people who said he must come and speak to the audience. We had heard that Dr. King had been shot, but we didn’t know his condition. We didn’t know he had died. So it was Robert Kennedy who announced his death to the audience. He said: “We have news that Dr. King has been assassinated.” He gave an unbelievable speech.

We all just cried. I have not been back to that spot since, but I made a commitment just a few days ago to go back for the fifiteth anniversary.

That evening of April 4, we went to Bobby’s room—I don’t remember the name of the hotel, it was an old hotel—and we all cried some more, and we made arrangements to go to Atlanta to help make preparations for the funeral. I think Bobby canceled all of his speaking engagements—except, I believe, for one in Cleveland.

KK: Yes, he talked about “the mindless menace of violence” and how it was cowardice and had never righted any wrong. Then he said, “There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.” That was considered a radical thing to say.

JL: When he came to Atlanta, we met at the Regency Hotel, a group of us. It was about three o’clock in the morning, and your father and mother said they wanted to say a prayer for Dr. King. It was my responsibility to lead them through the education part of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and we went downstairs and viewed Dr. King’s body. The next morning the family members attended the service, and Bobby walked the whole route from that church through the streets of Atlanta. I’ve said this in the past: He was the only white politician in America who could have walked with that crowd. There were other white politicians at the service, but they didn’t march. Hundreds of thousands of people walked from Ebenezer Church to the Morehouse campus, where there was another service.

I was with him next in Oregon, and to this day I think about it. The students at Portland State asked me to present Robert Kennedy, and I introduced him. It was an honor to be able to present him to that crowd. I’ve gone back there once since, to speak at Oregon State.

After that, I went on to California. I teamed up with Cesar Chavez, and it was just amazing. The two of us—we went into these wealthy neighborhoods, speaking to mostly wealthy white families for the contest between Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Bobby. We also organized black and Latino communities in LA County and thereabouts, but the neighborhoods we worked in—it was this Latino guy and this black guy, knocking door to door, saying to white people, “You’ve got to vote for Robert Kennedy.”

KK: How did they receive you?

JL: They received us well—very well.

KK: Did they know who you were?

JL: Oh, yes. Yes.

KK: I can’t imagine having the two of you come to my door. People must have been shocked and thrilled.

JL: In the motorcade and around LA County, there were thousands of people. You knew, you felt it in the air—he was going to win. You knew it was going to be a victory. People by the hundreds and thousands gathered along the streets and waved and cheered for Bobby. The people loved him. It was the Olympic champion Rafer Johnson and the football star Rosey Grier in the car with him, and people were grabbing all over the place. They wanted to touch him.

That night, at the Ambassador Hotel, I did not go down. I went to the suite. I was in the suite, and your aunt was in the suite—Pat Kennedy; Jack Newfield of the Village Voice; Teddy White, who wrote histories of presidential elections; Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’s brother, other people—and Bobby was joking with me. He said, “John, you let me down. More Mexican Americans turned out to vote than Negroes,” or something like that. He was teasing me. He said, “I’m going down to make my victory statement, and I’ll be returning.”

Everyone turned away from the TV screen after Bobby finished his victory speech, and everyone was talking and laughing, waiting for him to come back upstairs. A woman cried out, “Oh, my God,” and I looked at the black-and-white screen of the TV, and the commentator was saying Bobby had just been shot. I dropped to the floor and I couldn’t stop crying. Over and over again I kept saying, “Why? Why? Why?”

I just wanted to get out of there. I went downstairs and walked through the ballroom, where people were still sitting amid the red and blue streamers; I was in shock, I was crying. I walked back to my hotel. It was three a.m. when I fell asleep. The next morning I packed my bags and got a flight back home to Atlanta. I think I cried all the way, literally. It was one of the saddest times of my life. We were flying over the mountains. It was June. We were flying over the hills and the mountains, and you could still see snow, even though it was June.

Later the next day, June 6, someone from the campaign, a friend or family, called and invited me to come to New York and stand in an honor guard. In the evening, I stood with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded Dr. King at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he asked me to ride the train from New York to Washington, and several members of the family and other people who were part of the campaign also asked me. Along the way we saw people all over just waving and crying, and I remember seeing your brother Joe, who was walking up and down in the train, greeting people and thanking them for being there. Somehow, I didn’t want that train to stop. I wanted it to just keep on going, but I knew we had to get to Arlington Cemetery.

When the train came into Washington, the Poor People’s Campaign was going on there. The train stopped in front of what they called Resurrection City, and they sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was very uplifting and moving. It was a salute to Bobby Kennedy and to his memory. People knew they had lost a fighter, a warrior for their cause. People were convinced that if he had lived, they would have been better off. Everyone believed he would have been elected president. I think they knew something was dying in America and something was dying in all of us. I truly believe that’s what was happening.

I think about Robert Kennedy often—and about Dr. King and President Kennedy too. If it hadn’t been for Bobby, I wouldn’t be involved in American politics. At difficult times, I’ve often asked myself, “What would Robert Kennedy do?” I’ve felt, on many occasions, when I was trying to decide whether to run for office or do anything: “Someone, sometime, someplace, has to pick up where he left off.” I know he inspired an entire generation. So many of the young people who read about him, who listened to his speeches—those people have gone on to do things in his spirit.

He was an inspiring human being. He inspired us to stand up and to speak out, to be courageous. He had noble aspirations. He wanted not just to make America better but to make the world better. He really believed we could all do that. You know, he went to Mississippi, to the delta, to the Southwest, where people were suffering. He felt the pain and the hurt. Many of us today, as politicians and elected officials, we don’t go to many of these places. We can all learn from him. We all have dreams, and he wanted to make the dreams real. It wasn’t just about racial justice for him. It was about economic justice.

That is so important to recognize for us now, because in our country, that’s really the number one issue. There’s such a division between rich and poor, the people who are struggling and feel locked out of everything. Robert Kennedy’s message to us today is to help those who need help the most, the most vulnerable segment of our society: the poor, the downtrodden, the desperate mothers, the out-of-work fathers, the hungry children. I see it in the eyes, and in the faces, of people who’ve been put down because they’re immigrants, especially the Latino population. Bobby identified with Cesar Chavez. He loved the man! And when Cesar broke that fast, Bobby was there with him.

Your father was just a wonderful man, a loving human being. When he died, our country, and our world, lost a determined dreamer, a man of hope, a man of possibilities. I’m sorry…

When I think of where the country could have been… where the world community could have been… I truly believe something died in all of us. I know something died in me. And that’s why I look at his picture in my office, and I look at the bust at my home in Atlanta…

I’m sorry. It’s so emotional.

That’s why you have to keep going, moving on, and trying to inspire more young people to stand up, to get up.

KK: John, you are right, something in our country died. We lost Jack, we lost Dr. King, we lost my father, and we lost Malcolm X. People were stunned; it seemed that all hope was being gunned down. I feel that the American heart was broken, or a large piece of it. It was broken again and again in those years. People said, “No. I just don’t believe in it anymore.” I don’t want to have that hope and then see it shattered again.

JL: People didn’t want their hearts broken again. A lot of people felt that way. “Why should I have faith?” You have these people who you love, and then something steals that love away, shatters that dream, and… What do you do?

KK: I think it hardened our country.

JL: You pick it up, you keep going. You have to find a way.

That night, you know, when your father spoke after Martin was killed, when other cities were burning, Indianapolis was so peaceful. A lot of people really think the words that Bobby spoke, that speech—it saved that city. Maybe other places too…