JON MEACHAM on John Lewis and Civil Rights
“The world he was fighting to change sixty years ago is in some ways resurgent, and the lessons and the strengths he brought to the fight bear our attention.”
John Lewis lived two storied lives: one as a very young civil rights leader in the 1950s and 1960s, and one as a selfless congressman widely seen as “the conscience of the Congress” from the late 1980s until his death last year from pancreatic cancer. During both of these lives, Lewis, a sharecropper’s son from Alabama, repeatedly showed physical and moral courage, as well as an unyielding dedication to the mission of improving lives by having America live up to the promises made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Lewis’s life in Congress lasted more than three decades. While there, he had the universal respect of his colleagues, and was a key voice on civil and human rights initiatives. But it was John Lewis’s life as a civil rights activist for a decade that will forever be seen as his most historic legacy.
It was during that time that he was one of the leaders of the dangerous Freedom Rides; that he was imprisoned for leading countless civil rights and voting rights demonstrations; that he was the youngest featured speaker (at twenty-three) at the historic March on Washington in August of 1963; that he was physically beaten into unconsciousness while nonviolently protesting; and that he led over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, two marches that ultimately helped persuade Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It is this period of Lewis’s life on which Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, focused his attention. In retracing Lewis’s steps, Jon vividly captured the challenges, risks, and courage involved in the life of this heroic civil rights leader. Jon was also able to interview Lewis about his early civil rights activities, and many of those interviews occurred while John Lewis was courageously fighting cancer.
I have interviewed Jon Meacham in person on a number of occasions, but did so this time virtually from our respective homes for a New-York Historical Society program on September 11, 2020. The interview, like John Lewis’s life, was quite riveting, for Jon was able to eloquently capture the civil rights icon’s humanity, courage, leadership, and humility.
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Your books are often about people who are not alive when you started writing about them. What prompted you to write a book about John Lewis?
JON MEACHAM (JM): I was standing on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March of 2020 with my family and about a thousand other people. It was John’s last trip there, and that was fairly evident. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the previous fall.
I’d known him for about twenty-eight years. I always thought I would write about him, but I wasn’t sure when. I thought I had another decade or so, because I thought he would keep going. I was standing there watching him, and he had, because of the cancer, lost a lot of weight. So he was physically more like the John Lewis who had been on the bridge on Bloody Sunday in 1965, more like the Lewis of the Freedom Rides and the sit-ins of 1960, ’61, ’62.
I realized, as he was speaking, that his life and message are exactly the antidotes to where we are now politically. He spoke of faith, both in God and in America, both secular and sacred terms. And I thought, “This is a story that needs to be told as much as possible. Not because it’s a fairy tale, not because it’s uncomplicated, but because it is complicated.” The world he was fighting to change sixty years ago is in some ways resurgent, and the lessons and the strengths he brought to the fight bear our attention.
DR: He had already written an autobiography. When you told him about this, did he say, “I don’t need any more books about me”?
JM: He was very generous. He has a really excellent autobiography, Walking with the Wind, published in 1998. What I told him was that I wanted to do a kind of theological view of what had brought him to the bridge.
That was the fundamental question: Why was he on that bridge on Sunday, March 7, 1965? There were a lot of other places he could have been. What was it about him, his character, his background, his vision of the world that put him in the maelstrom of history?
He said, “Call anytime.” We talked probably a dozen times, from early March until the third week of June. He died on July 17.
I don’t always do this, but in the three decades or so that I’d known him, whenever we’d spoken, I tended to keep notes on it, because he was a very astute student of history. John was one of the great listeners of all time. Howard Baker once said that the art of politics lies to some extent in the art of listening eloquently. And John Lewis did that.
And when he spoke, he did so with this prophetic voice, this deep voice. And we argued for twenty-eight years about a very fundamental point, which was that John Lewis believed that if you and I put our hearts and minds in the right place, if we oriented ourselves correctly, we could bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. That the vision of Isaiah, the vision of Micah, the vision of the Christian New Testament could come into actual, tangible reality.
I don’t believe that. I think that we’re too frail, too fallible to do it, but John Lewis did believe it. I wanted to explore the experience of someone born in a segregated society who faced white-sanctioned, state-sanctioned totalitarian violence. What made him think that perfection was possible? That was not an angle of vision that he had spent a lot of time contemplating himself, so he was very welcoming to that theme being explored.
DR: Did he live to see a draft of your book?
JM: He read it. I was touched by that. He contributed an afterword. I wanted him to have the last word, because this is an appreciative account.
There may be warts to John Lewis, but if so, they’re pretty minor. They’re mostly about pride and ego, more than anything else, which is another reason I wanted to do it. You and I know a lot of folks who had exemplary early careers who tended to take care of themselves as life went on. They started out doing good and they ended up doing well. John Lewis didn’t do that. He stayed in the fight, he stayed in the arena. And I wanted to explore what the roots of that had been.
DR: You really don’t go into his congressional career, which was more than three decades. You wanted to focus on the civil rights struggle and his involvement in it?
JM: I did. I wasn’t that interested in his congressional career, honestly. It was interesting in that he continued to speak out on national issues, but markup sessions in the Age of Clinton were not something that I wanted to spend a lot of time on.
This was really my opinion and my understanding of what religious faith can do in our politics when it is marshaled and managed by people of goodwill. That was a very particular point I wanted to make.
DR: Some people today may be familiar with him as a member of Congress, but many people may not be familiar with exactly what he did during the civil rights struggle. Where was he born, and did he come from a prominent family?
JM: No. He was born on February 21, 1940, in Pike County, Alabama, the great-grandson of a slave, a grandson and son of sharecroppers. Pike County is about fifty miles from Montgomery—red clay, Black Belt Alabama. Eight or nine children in the family.
He overcame a childhood stutter by preaching to the chickens in his farmyard. He took care of the chickens for the family. It was one of the ways his theological vision became manifest as he would baptize them and marry them. Once, when he was baptizing one, he drowned it, and that was a problem. He said his first act of nonviolent protest was refusing to eat chicken at dinner. He thought it was the death of one of his soulmates.
His father was, as I say, a farmer and drove a school bus. His mother had jobs around town. It was a classically poor life, economically poor, in a segregated county, in a segregated state.
DR: How old was he before he saw a white person?
JM: About fourteen or fifteen, when he went into town. The mailman was the white person.
He applied for a library card and was refused. When the Brown school desegregation decision [Brown v. Board of Education, decided by the Supreme Court] came on May 17, 1954, he expected his new white friends to come to school with him. He was sitting there waiting for what Dr. King and James Lawson called “The Beloved Community” to come into effect.
The media coverage of the civil rights movement was hugely important. He read about Brown in the newspaper that his grandfather subscribed to. He saw the pictures of the lynching of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. He read about Autherine Lucy, the woman who attempted to desegregate the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. He heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio coming from Montgomery.
He had an innate revulsion against segregation. That was one tributary of his life. The other tributary was seeing that the world beyond Troy, Alabama, was quickening to the same cause. And those two tributaries merged when he came to Nashville.
DR: He came to Nashville to go to a seminary, is that correct?
JM: Yes. American Baptist Theological Seminary is up on a hill over the Cumberland River, not far from where I’m sitting.
DR: When he came there, all of a sudden he got involved in civil rights protests. What propelled him to do that? Were his parents supporting him to do that or not?
JM: No. One of the things about John is his life was quite biblical. He was not John Lewis when he was growing up, he was Robert Lewis or Bob. When he came to Nashville, he became John Lewis.
[In the Bible] Abraham was renamed. Elijah was renamed. Peter was renamed. When you receive new work, you’re renamed. He had to walk away, to some extent, from his family of origin to take up that cross and that course. He comes to Nashville in the fall of ’57, during the Little Rock Nine experience over in Arkansas. He’s at American Baptist, which is a Black school, run by the white Southern Baptist Convention to train Black ministers. It’s very modest, two or three buildings up on a hill called the Holy Hill. So, as in the Bible, he went to a mountaintop to receive this new work.
He encountered Kelly Miller Smith, the pastor of the largest Black church in Nashville, who had helped bring in a man named James Lawson. I think Lawson may be the most important living American about whom not enough people know.
Lawson was a Methodist minister. He was a conscientious objector during Korea. He went to jail for refusing to be drafted into the conflict. He went to India, he met with Gandhi’s lieutenants. Gandhi was dead by then, but Lawson saw that the tactics of nonviolence that had worked so well in India could be applied to the segregated order in the South.
He had come back to the United States and ran into Martin Luther King. When King realized that Lawson had both a theological background in the American church and the experience of knowing what Gandhi had done, he said, “You’re exactly the kind of person we need in the South.” And so, under the sponsorship of the Fellowship for Reconciliation, Lawson comes to Nashville.
Kelly Miller Smith recommends John Lewis go to these Tuesday-night workshops in the basement of a little brick Methodist church not far from the college. In those sessions, Lewis begins to really absorb the philosophy and the tactics of the nonviolence that he would carry to his grave.
DR: In all the protests that he was involved with, all the times he was hit by police, did he ever fight back?
JM: Only once, in Selma, before Bloody Sunday. Dr. King had come to town. He was desegregating the Hotel Albert, the old downtown hotel in Selma, and a white supremacist came up to King, struck him, tried to kick him in the groin, and Lewis reacted for the first and only time in that long life of civil disobedience by throwing his arms around the guy. He embraced him in a hug.
King was so important to Lewis. They were about twelve years apart in age. He was not quite a father figure, but he was very much an elder brother and could really do no wrong, in Lewis’s eyes. The love was such that Lewis was forced into that one instance of retaliatory action. And even that was a hug.
DR: So he gets involved in protests that are starting in Nashville and other cities to desegregate luncheon counters. Why did he choose that area to protest?
JM: The lunch counter was the public-facing facility in heavily trafficked department stores. We lose this now in the age of Amazon and Uber Eats and all that. But department stores were enormously important, because that’s where, in Black communities, you went and you got your Sunday clothes. It’s where you shopped. You could go in and spend your money, but you couldn’t go in and have a hamburger or a Coke.
It was this flashing red light for people about their second-class citizenship. Their money was good enough, but they weren’t good enough. It was also somewhat more straightforward than trying to integrate a school.
When you look at the civil rights movement, you see that the degree of difficulty rose. They start with public facilities in department stores, they move to interstate travel with the buses, and ultimately reach the schools and the ballot box. It was very carefully planned. These were not spontaneous demonstrations. They knew to dress well. They knew to go and buy something, so they were paying customers. They were to say “sir” and “ma’am,” very carefully calibrated.
It also had an economic effect, because the department stores depended on these folks for a huge part of their income. Before they were fully ready to launch the all-out effort in Nashville, students in Greensboro [North Carolina] acted more organically. They sat in at a Woolworth’s, I think it was.
Then a minister in Greensboro called James Lawson and said, “What can the students of Nashville do to support the students of Greensboro?” At that point, all these separate movements that had been taking shape in the South more or less rose up simultaneously.
A Nashville sit-in was Lewis’s first arrest. And interestingly—again, biblical—he felt, as he put it, free. The freest he’d ever felt was when he was put in the paddy wagon in downtown Nashville, which was the way Saint Paul felt, the way Silas felt, the way the New Testament folks felt when they were imprisoned for the faith. They felt that they were actually fulfilling their mission in life.
DR: What were the Freedom Riders, and why was John Lewis indispensable to that effort?
JM: Imagine how important buses were in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. People—particularly people without great means—were not jumping on airplanes. The way folks got around was on buses and trains. There’d been a Supreme Court decision, the Boynton decision, that had ordered the integration of interstate travel facilities, but nobody was paying any attention to it.
And so the Freedom Rides took shape in May of 1961. They were going to send integrated groups of protesters on Greyhound and Trailways buses into the segregated South to both integrate the buses themselves and, also as important, the restrooms, the lunch counters, the facilities that were downtown, and the bus stations—sixty or seventy years ago, the bus stations were pretty important cultural landmarks in these different southern cities. It would be as if they were integrating airports now.
In May of ’61, this was Lewis’s first trip to Washington. He spends the night at a Quaker meetinghouse. They have what they jokingly but mordantly called a Last Supper at a restaurant in Cleveland Park in Washington. First time he met Stokely Carmichael.
They get on the buses and head south. And he’s beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina, by a Klansman, man named Elwin Wilson, who, in 2009, moved by the election of Barack Obama, reaches out to John Lewis to say, “I’m the one who beat you in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1961, and I want to apologize.” And John accepted his apology, forgave him, and they became friendly. Again—biblical. Jesus told us to love our enemies. Who does that? Well, John Lewis did.
DR: The Freedom Rides resulted in the president of the United States sending his people down, through the Justice Department, to make certain that violence wasn’t out of control. Is that right?
JM: Yes. They got to Montgomery and Birmingham and ultimately Jackson, Mississippi, and that’s when the trouble truly started. There was an enormous amount of violence. Lewis was knocked to the pavement. John Seigenthaler, the personal representative of the president of the United States and the attorney general, a Nashville newspaper man, was also knocked unconscious.
We’re still not quite sure how long John Lewis was out. He ends up in Jackson, Mississippi, and is sent to Parchman, which is the penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta that William Faulkner described as “Destination Doom.”
We’ve all seen many of the images of John Lewis and his colleagues being struck, being hit, bleeding in the streets. But I submit, and he agreed, that he was actually in more physical danger when he was in police custody. He was arrested forty times in the course of the movement. But imagine, when the cameras weren’t there, how much danger those “outside agitators” were in, and the remarkable physical bravery of this young man.
He starts when he’s twenty during the sit-ins in Nashville, he’s twenty-one during the Freedom Rides. He’s twenty-two and twenty-three during Freedom Summer and when he addresses the March on Washington. He’s twenty-five when he’s on the Pettus Bridge. He’s just so young, which is another biblical parallel—“and a little child shall lead them.” He was more than a little child, but he was incredibly brave physically.
DR: I guess it’s biblical that he was in the prison forty days and forty nights?
JM: Yes. It goes on and on. It’s fascinating. I argue in the book that he was a saint, and it’s not to make a stained-glass figure or say that he should be removed from the ordinary run of human experience, but saints aren’t saviors. Saints are just believers who are a little more virtuous than the rest of us.
DR: After President Kennedy is assassinated, President Johnson comes in and the 1964 Civil Rights Act is passed. Why didn’t John Lewis say, “I’ve gotten a lot of things done. I’ll go get my college degree and get a job doing something else”? He wanted to pursue voting rights?
JM: Two things happened in 1964 that don’t get a lot of attention anymore. One was the treatment of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at Atlantic City during the Democratic Convention.
Johnson does a brave thing. He passes the civil rights bill when he didn’t really have to. He could have waited until after the ’64 election. It was signed the first week of July in ’64, but Johnson—an amazing politician, as we know—saw the white backlash coming. Having signed the bill, he wanted to shut down as best he could the movement of the South to the Republican Party. He would slow it, but he couldn’t stop it. One of the ways he wanted to slow it was by refusing to seat an integrated delegation at the convention.
The other delegation, called the regulars, was the all-white segregated one. When we look at 1964 results, we think it’s crazy, but Johnson believed that the whole South could go for Barry Goldwater. He was egged on by John Connally of Texas. I heard him on tape.
Neither delegation is seated. The whites leave, and Johnson, even when the whites walked out, would not seat the integrated delegation.
Until I was dealing with John on this, I didn’t appreciate this. It was the first big break in the civil rights movement between the people who thought that the power structure could be brought into harmony with the ideals of the movement. Suddenly they saw that they couldn’t count on the politicians in Washington.
They had come through a couple of years where they had done great education. They had been brave. The Kennedy administration had moved slowly, but had gotten there. Johnson had pushed the bill through, but then they realized there was a limit to that progress.
That was one of the moments when Lewis realized, “The only way we’re going to be fully engaged as citizens is if we can vote for these folks and if they are accountable not simply to white people but to us.” That’s when the push for voting rights really took shape.
DR: So John Lewis stays involved and he begins one of three marches across the Pettus Bridge. The first march, he’s the leader. He’s walking as the head person, although he’s still very young. What happened when he walked across the big bridge?
JM: They started at Brown Chapel AME Church, which is where the memorial service was held for him in July of 2020. The plan was to march from Selma to Montgomery. The idea was to march that fifty-four miles or so to end up at the Alabama State Capitol, George Wallace’s Capitol, where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861, and to present the demands for voting rights to the government.
Lewis is at the front of the line with Hosea Williams. Andy Young is back at Brown Chapel. They have medics on hand because they anticipated some trouble. They get to the top of the bridge.
It’s a big bridge. You’re pretty high up there. The Alabama River is brown and swirling. They get to the top and they look down and they see, as John said, a sea of blue. It was Alabama state troopers and also posse men, deputized white supremacists from Jim Clark, the Dallas County sheriff, who were determined that they were going to teach these agitators a lesson.
The marchers get to the foot of the bridge. They asked for a moment to kneel and pray. The Alabama official says, “There’ll be no word, there’ll be nothing.” Then the tear gas comes and the beatings start.
DR: Lewis is hit over the head and knocked unconscious for a while?
JM: He is. He doesn’t remember how he got back to Brown Chapel. The tear gas is something that I hadn’t fully appreciated until I read the FBI reports. The FBI had lots of people there. They weren’t helping, of course, but they were watching, and the FBI reported everything as you know. It was particularly difficult, tear gas.
DR: They have another march, which Martin Luther King leads over the bridge. What happens when he gets to the place?
JM: He stopped. This is one of the great weeks in American political history. When you do projects like this, you realize there are these inflection points that could be an entire book themselves.
June 11–12, 1963, could be a book. Wallace stands in the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa, Kennedy gives the speech on civil rights, and Medgar Evers is assassinated in Jackson, all in the span of a day.
The time between Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965—and Johnson giving eight days later the great voting rights speech “We Shall Overcome” is also a fascinating slice of American history, because Johnson wanted both sides to submit ultimately to his authority.
He brought George Wallace up and gave him the Johnson treatment, loomed over him, said, “George, what are you doing down there?” He forced Wallace to say that he would allow a safe march from Selma to Montgomery. At the same time, Johnson is forcing King and others—John Lewis is in the hospital—to submit to Judge Frank Johnson’s orders, that they would wait for the injunction against the march to be lifted.
DR: There’s a third march over the bridge, which is the one that’s going to be allowed. On that one, even though John Lewis was physically impaired, he does walk the entire way to Montgomery?
JM: He walks the fifty-four miles. He can do about seven or eight miles a day. Then they drive him back, he sleeps, and they drive him back again. It was an incredibly important march to finish, and they do end up at the Capitol. They do end up giving important speeches there. That was the force that ultimately led in August to the Voting Rights Act.
DR: After the incredible courage that John Lewis has shown throughout this early part of his life, he is voted out as the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Stokely Carmichael replaces him. Why were people upset with him after all the courageous things he had done?
JM: Nonviolence was out of fashion even when white people thought it was in fashion. One of the things about the reaction to John’s death I thought was so fascinating is that almost no one addressed this tension. Dr. King and Lewis and their adherents who wanted to turn the other cheek, who wanted to use nonviolence to make the long and slow struggle for justice, were running into an immense amount of pressure for the conversation and the tactics to move from “Love thy enemy” to Black Power, to a more—and I use this word advisedly—proactive, more aggressive way of trying to address the issues of social, political, and economic injustice.
The borders between these philosophies are more porous than the popular version has it. But John Lewis was seen by May of 1966 as too close to the White House. The Sunday-school piety of the King-Lewis movement was falling out of fashion.
DR: For the rest of his life he’s valued for what he’s done and has a lot of very important jobs, but the greatest things he did were probably in his twenties. Did he regret that he lost this position? Do you think the rest of his life was as valuable as what he’d done in his twenties?
JM: He never really got over losing to Carmichael. It was very difficult. He went into a kind of self-imposed exile for two years. Then he came back in ’68 and was working for Robert Kennedy, for that presidential campaign, both when Dr. King was killed and when Senator Kennedy was killed.
No, he saw his life as a series of sequential chapters that were about bringing the Declaration of Independence into fuller realization and trying to bring about that beloved community. I don’t think he had a hierarchy of satisfaction about what he’d done.
If anything, I think the steadiness of purpose that he brought to his work is something that almost befuddled me. What does he do at the end of his life? He’s standing at Black Lives Matter Plaza. He’s talking to President Obama on a virtual town hall about the murder of George Floyd. And so his life was of a piece.