Rest In Power

One of my first votes was for John Lewis as Congressman for the Atlanta House district. I had voted in the '84 debacle for Mondale, but that was absentee, and when I voted for Lewis, I remember doing so at the Bobby Jones Public Golf Course down the hill from my home at the time. I just recently finished Kevin Kruse's book on the desegregation battles in Atlanta - White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. In it, Kruse examines the myths and realities of the "City to Busy to Hate" that handled integration "peacefully."  He also explains how white responses to integration helped create the "rights based" white grievance that fuels modern Conservatism.

Anyway, John Lewis appears in the book as one of the "Angry Young Men" who pushed integration too fast for the elderly Black leadership in Atlanta., who had joined with business leaders and politicians to create an orderly, negotiated desegregation. Lewis and others would have none of that and pushed harder and faster than the "Hartsfield Coalition" could stomach.  That history occurred to me as I read this Twitter thread about John Lewis being talked off the rhetorical cliffs that he had staked out before his speech during the March on Washington in 1963.  The speech was too fiery, too radical for A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr., so they worked with him to tone it down. As the author of the thread notes, Lewis accepted the criticism and even leaned into the new phrasings designed to make his message more palatable.

Meanwhile, on Twitter today, there are the usual crowd of "Rose Twitter" sociopaths subtly and not-so-subtly taking shots at Lewis for being a "sell-out." Try and imagine what sort of dysfunctional grip on how politics works to call John Lewis a "sell-out," before thinking about what it means in moral terms.  Lewis was not the great orator of the movement, nor was he the consummate strategist. He was the moral North Star of civil rights since at least the Selma March in 1965, if not the speech that was redacted in '63.

Lewis must've learned that day in 1963 that there were limits to direct action. Direct action, nonviolent noncompliance must be wedded with the hard work of coalition building, the writing of laws and the inevitable compromises that come out of that slow progress. Rather than reject the prudence of the elders that sought to restrain his anger, he found a way to marry his purpose and righteousness with theirs.

He then spent the rest of his life working within and without the system to make real change happen. Along with CT Vivian - who also died yesterday - a generation of leaders are passing. It's sad that he could not live to see Trumpism repudiated at the polls, but it would be sadder still of a generation of young activists failed to learn the hard lessons that John Lewis put into action. Yes, get into "good trouble," but also build good institutions. Lewis spanned the gap between youthful anger and sager politics.  The Edmund Pettis Bridge was not the only one he crossed.