Lewis - A Lifetime of Action | Dewey Clayton

In January 2017, Dewey Clayton, a University of Louisville political science professor, shared with Courier Journal readers a 2013 interaction his students had with U.S. Rep. John Lewis in Louisville. The column describes the civil right giant’s humility and a “lifetime of action.” In 2000, the university’s Brandeis School of Law awarded Lewis the prestigious Brandeis Medal. Today, The Courier Journal re-publishes Professor Clayton’s column in honor of Lewis’ contributions – as a civil rights hero, in Congress and a leader in defending the rights of Black voters.

Moved by what she had learned in the class, one of my students, a white female, said she would love to shake Congressman Lewis’ hand. After the talk, I gathered my students and we approached the congressman and introduced ourselves. He shook our hands, and we took a photograph with him that proudly hangs on my office wall. Something that stood out to me during the talk was Lewis recalling how his parents told him at an early age to stay out of the way and don’t make trouble.  

Fast forward to this January, on the eve of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. President-elect Donald Trump responded on Twitter to comments Congressman John Lewis made on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he did not see Trump as a legitimate president and wouldn’t be attending his inauguration. As he is prone to do, Trump fired back on Twitter saying Lewis is “All talk, talk, talk – no action or results.” 

When I first heard the comments I was amazed, knowing that John Lewis is a man who has had a lifetime of activism.

Lewis was a student at the American Theological Seminary in 1960 and was deeply moved by the Montgomery bus boycott. He and other students in Nashville, Tenn., were determined to do something about racial segregation in the South and get involved in the movement.  They began attending nonviolent workshops and learning about the tactics of civil disobedience and passive resistance. They created an organization called the Nashville Student Movement with the goal to abolish segregation in Nashville, starting with the downtown department store lunch counters. The sit-ins began in Nashville in the spring of 1960. Later that spring, more than 300 black and white college students from around the country met in Raleigh, N.C., and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Lewis was jailed on numerous occasions in his efforts to desegregate lunch counters, but he was not deterred. In 1961, Lewis participated in the Freedom Rides, which were sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality.  CORE recruited an interracial group of 13 people for the trip, scheduled to go from Washington and arrive in New Orleans two weeks later. The Freedom Riders wanted to test whether southern states were abiding by U.S. Supreme Court decisions that outlawed segregation in interstate travel. Traveling on two buses, they encountered only minor violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Lewis was attacked in South Carolina), but they were beaten badly in Anniston, Birmingham, and Montgomery, Alabama. Later, in 1961, the Kennedy Administration wanted the protesters to shift their attention from direct action to voter registration. Lewis recounts in his autobiography, “Walking with the Wind,” he and other members of SNCC were skeptical. Said Lewis, “To me the matter was simple.  We had gotten this far by dramatizing the issue of segregation, by putting it onstage and keeping it onstage.  I believed firmly that we needed to push and push and not stop pushing.” 

In 1963, Lewis became chairman of SNCC. He was one of the “Big Six” leaders who organized the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At 21-years-old, Lewis was the youngest speaker at the March on Aug. 28, 1963, and the only survivor. King would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech that day. The following year, SNCC launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign in the state of Mississippi. The state’s regular Democratic Party was segregated and would not allow African Americans to be delegates to its national convention. In the spring of 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was officially created to challenge the all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J. that summer. SNCC wanted to educate and register blacks to vote throughout the state that summer. To help with this effort, Lewis and others traveled the country to recruit black and white college students to register blacks to vote, and teach in freedom schools in Mississippi that summer. Three civil rights workers were killed outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.  Later that summer an MFDP delegation went to Atlantic City but were not seated.   

In 1965, Lewis’ skull was fractured as he was beaten at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge as he attempted to march with other civil rights activists from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama to protest the violence African Americans endured by trying to vote or even registering to vote. The event became known as “Bloody Sunday” and galvanized the nation and forced President Lyndon Johnson to call on Congress to pass a Voting Rights bill. 

In 1986, Lewis was elected to the U.S. Congress where he has continued to “get in the way” and to speak out against injustices of all kinds, not just those involving race. In fact, in June 2016, Lewis helped lead a sit-in at the Capitol demanding a vote on gun safety. 

Despite what Donald Trump tweets, Lewis has had a lifetime of action and of results. How many of us can say that we have worked our entire adult lives toward the goal of equality for all? In 2011 President Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor bestowed on a civilian and it was recently announced that one of the Navy’s newest ships will be named after him. He is truly an American hero. Despite his parents’ warnings, Lewis has been making trouble all his life, but as he says, it’s “good trouble.”

Dewey M. Clayton, Ph.D. is a political science professor at the University of Louisville.