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RIP John Lewis

 
 
 
lpetrich

lpetrich

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John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80 - The New York Times -  John Lewis (civil rights leader)

John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was a civil-rights activist and leader, and then a politician, serving in the House of Representatives from 1987 to his recent death. His district, GA-05, contains the northern 3/4 of Atlanta GA.

He was born in Troy, Alabama, the son of two sharecroppers, and he ran into racial segregation and discrimination -- and he learned from relatives in the North that there were integrated schools, buses, and businesses there. In his teens, he followed civil-rights activism, and in his college years, he became an activist himself, participating in desegregation sit-ins and bus boycotts and the like, while being firmly committed to nonviolent activism. He was also one of the 13 original Freedom Riders in 1961. They were some black and white activists who were determined to ride buses while sitting next to each other, in defiance of segregation laws.

He and fellow activists suffered numerous beatings and jailings as they went, but that didn't stop them. He became the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist organization in 1963, and he helped organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in that year. In that march, Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech.

But he didn't stop there. He was involved in efforts to register black people to vote in Southern states, and in 1965, he was involved in a march that tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL. A phalanx of state troopers in riot gear was on the other side, and the troopers ordered the marchers to disperse. When they didn't, the troopers used tear gas on the marchers and beat them. One of them cracked JL's skull with a truncheon, knocking him to the ground, and they beat him when he tried to get up. He thought that he was about to die, but he survived, and escaped.

JL continued his activism, being involved in various activist organizations, and then running for office. After an unsuccessful run for the US House seat GA-05 in 1977, he ran for Atlanta City Council and won in 1980, serving until 1986. That year, he ran for that House seat again, and won. He was re-elected 16 times, serving in that seat for the rest of his life.
 
John Lewis continued his activism when he was in Congress. He was known as one of that body's most liberal members, and someone praised him as "the conscience of Congress".

He opposed involvement in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 iraq War, and he opposed the Clinton Administration on NAFTA and welfare reform. He was a fierce critic of George Bush II, and he even proposed impeaching him about him getting the National Security Agency to do wiretaps without warrants. "He is not king, he is president." He boycotted Bush II's inauguration and he once spoke to some protesters of that president's Iraq War.

Each year, JL liked to retrace the route of his 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery AL.

2016 firearm safety legislation sit-in

On June 22, 2016, House Democrats, led by Lewis and Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark, began a sit-in demanding House Speaker Paul Ryan allow a vote on gun-safety legislation in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting. Speaker pro tempore Daniel Webster ordered the House into recess, but Democrats refused to leave the chamber for nearly 26 hours.
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He supported Hillary Clinton at first in 2008, then switched to Barack Obama. "Something is happening in America and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap."

Hillary Clinton he supported again in 2016. About Bernie Sanders, he said "To be very frank, I never saw him, I never met him. I chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved in sit-ins, in the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the March from Selma to Montgomery... but I met Hillary Clinton". BS was in Chicago at the time, however.

Donald Trump he compared to George Wallace. "I've been around a while and Trump reminds me so much of a lot of the things that George Wallace said and did. I think demagogues are pretty dangerous, really... We shouldn't divide people, we shouldn't separate people."

When Trump was elected, "I don't see the president-elect as a legitimate president." Also "I think the Russians participated in having this man get elected, and they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. I don't plan to attend the Inauguration. I think there was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians, and others, that helped him get elected. That's not right. That's not fair. That's not the open, democratic process."

Trump responded with saying that JL should "spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to [...] mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results." Also saying that JL was "All talk, talk, talk – no action or results. Sad!
 
In 2019 Dec 29, John Lewis was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. "I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now."

From the NYT:
Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966. He was beaten senseless repeatedly by Southern policemen and freelance hoodlums. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Ala., after he and others were attacked by hundreds of white people. He spent countless days and nights in county jails and 31 days in Mississippi’s notoriously brutal Parchman Penitentiary.
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Also from there,
More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against police killings of Black people and, more broadly, against systemic racism in many corners of society. He saw those protests as a continuation of his life’s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sidelines.

“It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets — to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call ‘good trouble,’” Mr. Lewis told “CBS This Morning” in June.

“This feels and looks so different,” he said of the Black Lives Matter movement, which drove the anti-racism demonstrations. “It is so much more massive and all inclusive.” He added, “There will be no turning back.”

He died on the same day as did another stalwart of the civil rights movement, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Opinion | John Lewis to Black Lives Matter protesters: ‘Give until you cannot give any more’ - The Washington Post

John Lewis: from civil rights titan to Black Lives Matter | US news | The Guardian
 
At one time he was my Congressman. I voted for him three times.

He was a good human being in an age when this is a rare thing.
 
Article said:
The two men spoke privately after, Obama said, and Lewis told him "he could not have been prouder of their efforts -- of a new generation standing up for freedom and equality, a new generation intent on voting and protecting the right to vote, a new generation running for political office."
"Not many of us get to live to see our own legacy play out in such a meaningful, remarkable way. John Lewis did," Obama wrote. "And thanks to him, we now all have our marching orders -- to keep believing in the possibility of remaking this country we love until it lives up to its full promise."
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CNN
 
I wonder whom GA Democratic Party will nominate for the November election now. Maybe Stacey Abrams? Does she live in the 5th?
 
Clyburn echoes calls to rename Pettus bridge | TheHill
Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) echoed calls on Saturday for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., to be renamed after the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who died on Friday.

...
Pettus was a Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader.

“I think you ought to take a nice picture of that bridge with Pettus’s name on it, put it in a museum somewhere dedicated to the Confederacy and then rename that bridge and repaint it, redecorate it the John R. Lewis Bridge," Clyburn said on NBC's "Meet The Press."

I believe that will give the people of Selma something to rally around. I believe that will make a statement for people in this country that we do believe in that pledge, that vision of this country that’s in the last phrase of the pledge – ‘for liberty and justice for all,” he continued.

"Edmund Pettus was a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.Take his name off that bridge and replace it with a good man — John Lewis, the personification of the goodness of America — rather than to honor someone who disrespected individual freedoms."
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Or make a small monument with an explanation on it of who John Lewis was and who Edmund Pettus was.
 
 
Body of US rights icon Lewis crosses Selma bridge - BBC News
The body of the late US civil rights icon John Lewis has been carried over Selma's historic Edmund Pettus Bridge for a final time.

On 7 March 1965, known as "Bloody Sunday", Lewis and other peaceful protesters were attacked by Alabama police officers as they marched over the bridge.

They had planned to walk to state capital Montgomery to demand equal voting rights.
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Selma Helped Define John Lewis’s Life. In Death, He Returned One Last Time. - The New York Times
On a different Sunday in Selma, this one more than five decades ago, John Lewis was a 25-year-old activist wearing a long tan coat and carrying a backpack, helping to marshal hundreds of demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were bombarded by clouds of tear gas and swarmed by state troopers wielding clubs, one of which fractured Mr. Lewis’s skull.

Mr. Lewis, who died on July 17, was carried by a horse-drawn caisson on Sunday across the bridge one last time. He was surrounded by mourners drawn to what felt like sacred ground. They were there to bid farewell to Mr. Lewis, who became a guiding force in the civil rights movement in no small part because of his role in the march for the right to vote on March 7, 1965.

“It’s as significant as the Battle of Gettysburg in the history of this country,” said Ralph Williams, who had traveled 100 miles from Jasper, Ala., with his family. “But only one side had weapons in this battle.”

Selma was a stop in the valedictory pilgrimage retracing the arc of his life. The trek started on Saturday in Troy, the Alabama town near the cotton farm where he was raised, and continues this week onto Washington, where he served in Congress, and Atlanta, which became his home.
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This trip is also an acknowledgment of the passing of his generation of civil-rights leaders and the passing of the leadership torch to the Black Lives Matter movement. A movement that he appreciated.

Opinion | John Lewis to Black Lives Matter protesters: ‘Give until you cannot give any more’ - The Washington Post
Lewis told me he was “inspired” to see thousands of people in the United States and around the world peacefully protesting against police violence. “It was so moving and so gratifying to see people from all over America and all over the world saying through their action, ‘I can do something. I can say something’,” he told me during an interview for my podcast, “Cape Up.” “And they said something by marching and by speaking up and speaking out.”
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John Lewis to Lie in State in the Capitol Rotunda - The New York Times
Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia and a civil rights icon, will lie in state Monday in the Capitol Rotunda, the first Black lawmaker to receive one of the highest American honors, before a viewing for the public to be held outside.

With the Capitol closed to the public amid the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Lewis will spend only a few hours lying in state under the Capitol dome after an invitation-only ceremony reserved exclusively for members of the legislative branch on Monday afternoon. About 80 lawmakers are expected to attend, according to a Capitol official.

Afterward, Mr. Lewis’s coffin will be moved outside to the Capitol steps, and members of the public will be able to line up — with masks required and social distancing enforced — to view it from the plaza below on Monday evening and all day Tuesday.

Among those paying their respects will be Vice President Mike Pence and Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, according to their public schedules. President Trump is not scheduled to attend.

...
Last year, Representative Elijah E. Cummings became the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the Capitol, though he was honored in Statuary Hall, not in the Rotunda, where presidents and other statesmen have lain. The site is reserved for the nation’s most revered figures, most recently including President George Bush and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. Rosa Parks, the civil rights pioneer, lay in honor there in 2005, receiving the highest honor afforded to a private citizen.
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Trump says he won't pay his respects to Rep. Lewis at U.S. Capitol

President Trump on Monday said he does not plan to visit the U.S. Capitol over the next two days to pay his respects to Rep. John Lewis, the Democratic congressman from Georgia and civil rights icon who died earlier this month.

Speaking to reporters on the South Lawn, Trump was asked whether he planned to visit the Capitol Rotunda, where Lewis’s body will lie in state for private ceremonies before his casket is moved to the steps of the Capitol for public viewing.

“No, I won’t be going, no,” Trump said Monday when asked if he planned to attend the viewing of Lewis’s casket. The president spoke to reporters as he departed the White House en route for North Carolina, where he will participate in a roundtable discussion on the coronavirus crisis.
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I watched how the hearse stopped to pay homage at the Martin Luther King, Jr Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and then at the Black Lives Matter Plaza. The latter now effectively sanctified and deserving to be elevated to National Heritage Area status, as it serves to connect our nation's capital with dozens of other cities across the US that created similar displays of unity in the wake of the George Floyd murder. A wake, awake, awoken.
 
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Mara Gay on Twitter: "The last word goes to you, Congressman.
“Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.”
John Lewis’ final op-ed to the country he loved. https://t.co/Ii4CRY5xOY" / Twitter

Yamiche Alcindor on Twitter: "John Lewis asked The NYT to publish this on the day of his funeral. It is necessary reading. He writes, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something ... Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part.” https://t.co/gNWQDpeAZt" / Twitter

Opinion | John Lewis: Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation - The New York Times
Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

By John Lewis
Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his funeral.

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.
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He continued with how he got involved in civil-rights activism, and he encouraged present-day people to do likewise.
 
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