John Lewis: A Great American

Rep. John Lewis already had my deepest respect and admiration when he announced he would not attend the January 2017 inauguration of Trump.

“I don’t see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” he said, adding, “You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong.”

The Georgia democrat, first elected to the House of Representatives in 1986, died from pancreatic cancer on July 17 at the age of eighty.

He had my deepest respect and admiration not only for unimaginable acts of courage, but for his obvious integrity.

That courage – in the sense of functioning in spite of fear – was demonstrated repeatedly by Lewis and countless others during the civil rights era. He was among the “Freedom Riders” who in 1961 challenged a racist southern custom. Custom is too polite a word for it: communities across the south ignored a Supreme Court ruling (Boynton v. Virginia) that made it illegal to deny services at bus stations along Interstate routes due to race. Over a period of weeks, and in several deep south states, Freedom Riders used these “services” (waiting rooms, rest rooms) – or attempted to – and were attacked and beaten by white mobs, and arrested and jailed by racist cops. Buses were firebombed.

There’s a well-known photograph, quite sickening, of Lewis and another Freedom Rider, James Zwerg. It was taken shortly after both were brutally beaten at a Montgomery, AL bus station. They are battered and bloody. Zwerg also had some teeth knocked out.

In 1965 John Lewis was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others in voting rights demonstrations in Selma, AL. These culminated in vicious attacks by mounted police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Ordered to disperse, demonstrators walked across that bridge anyway with the full expectation they would be beaten.

The cops also fired tear gas. “If you’ve ever been in tear gas, it makes you feel like, you just feel like giving up, you know,” John Lewis told Howell Raines in the 1970s. “I thought it was the end.” There’s a picture of Lewis on the ground, taken as one of the cops clubs him. “I was hit [in the head] almost in the same spot that I was hit on the Freedom Ride in 1961 by an officer, by a state trooper. This trooper just kept hitting.” He was hospitalized for three days with a brain concussion.

Meanwhile Trump was in a formative period of his own, learning to covet money, power, and himself above all else. I almost feel sorry for him. Almost.

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” as the Selma violence came to be known, John Lewis received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barrack Obama.

He also spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. So I’ll say it again: John Lewis already had my deep respect and admiration when he announced he would skip Trump’s inauguration.

“I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected," Lewis said shortly after the 2016 election. “And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”

In late 2019, as the House debated Articles of Impeachment against Trump, Lewis told his colleagues they owed it to future generations to vote to impeach. “We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”

Unfortunately the fix was in, and Trump wriggled out of conviction. He continues to debase whatever he touches. May he keep his big mouth shut, and his Twitter finger still, in the aftermath of the death of John Lewis, who unlike Trump is a truly great American.