One recent night, in front of some 400 people at the Atlanta History Center, U.S. Rep. John Lewis discussed the greatest struggles of his life — struggles which coincide with many of the nation’s most painful.
As one of the young leaders of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights crusade, Lewis wiped spit from his face but refused to leave white-only lunch counters in Louisiana. He was kept naked in a jail cell in the Mississippi State Penitentiary but rejected ending his Freedom Ride from Washington to New Orleans. He was beaten unconscious on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., but returned three weeks later to cross the bridge with thousands of civil rights activists
from across the nation.
As Lewis relived these incidents, he seemed to swell with pride. There was only the faintest trace of bitterness in his voice and not one breath of regret as he recalled, with a certain nostalgia,
the strength and determination of the youthful activists of those times.
Lewis has a word for civil disobedience in the pursuit of justice. He calls it “noise.” And he sees far too little of it today.
“Young people today are too quiet,” he said. “We need some creative tension; people crying out for the things they want. There’s nothing wrong with a little agitation for what’s right or what’s fair.”
It is a call-to-action that Lewis has issued for years, one he hopes will draw new energy from the release of his autobiography, “Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.” The six-term Democratic congressman, whose Georgia district includes Atlanta, is touring the country to promote the book.
In an interview prior to the tour, Lewis said that the book is a tribute to the courage of young people who in the 1950s and ’60s risked their lives to end legal segregation and win the right to vote for all Americans.
Most of all, Lewis said he hopes that the struggles of his life will inspire today’s youth to make some noise–to stand up, sit in or march for their beliefs, whether they are popular or not.
Sadly, however, even he acknowledges that it is among young people that his message has the least resonance. Once a rebel, Lewis is nowperceived by youth as belonging to the very Establishment that they hold responsible for the problems of the African-American community.
And his integrationist beliefs have fallen out of favor with a generation that has made Malcolm X its model.
A mostly white audience
On the rainy night that Lewis spoke at the Atlanta History Center, there were very few young people in the audience. And the overwhelming majority of those who attended were white.
“I think because of the success and the progress we have made, (African American) people feel they got to where they are by themselves, with no civil rights movement, without affirmative action, no NAACP,” Lewis said. “They think they don’t need to work on these kinds of issues anymore. They start becoming like other Americans. They look at their own piece of the action and not at the larger community.
“What we need to get across to people is that it’s not enough for you to make it up the ladder. You must leave that ladder for someone else to (climb) up it.”
Acting on your beliefs is not theory to Lewis. It is his life. A short, balding man, Lewis grew up a sharecropper’s son. Politics has given him only a little polish. His speech is plain, and when he first meets someone he is apt to ask more questions about them than talk about himself. But when he does talk, his stories are chilling.
As Congress has descended ever further into partisan politics, Lewis stands as a voice of conscience.
In 1994, he voted against President Clinton’s crime bill, one of the most important goals of the Democratic administration, because the bill expanded the use of the death penalty to many additional crimes. And in 1995, while a million black men marched on Capitol Hill, Lewis stayed in his office and watched the demonstration on television. He said he did not participate in the march, organized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, because he feels Farrakhan preaches racism, sexism and anti-Semitism.
`All in the same boat’
There are, however, a lot of good non-violent campaigns he would like to join. For example, he said, Americans should be marching to secure more federal spending on public education, health benefits for all and greater protections for the environment.
Racial discrimination, he said, continues to be America’s greatest problem.
“I believe race is too heavy a burden to carry into the 21st Century,” he said. “It’s time to lay it down. We all came here in different ships, but now we’re all in the same boat.”
However, Lewis’ appeals, based on struggles more than three decades old, don’t have the same power as they did when he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 35 years ago.
His stories about fighting to ride at the front of the bus or sit at lunch counters don’t seem to connect with teenagers coping with issues like AIDS, alcohol abuse and violence among peers.
“Things are better now than they used to be, but there are still reasons to make noise,” Lewis said. “What I try to tell young people is that if you come together with a mission, and its grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.
