Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

by John Lewis

“Some men see things as they are and say ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’” —ROBERT F. KENNEDY

Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society. The work of love, peace, and justice will always be necessary, until their realism and their imperative takes hold of our imagination, crowds out any dream of hatred or revenge, and fills up our existence with their power.

We are one people, one family, the human family, and what affects one of us affects us all.

What is the purpose of a nation if not to empower human beings to live better together than they could individually?

The collective power of the people is not only a material, emotional, and economic resource, but it is a spiritual force as well. As we look back on our national story we can see many accounts of “man’s unending search for freedom,” as President Lyndon Johnson once put it. It is a struggle not only against the oppression imposed by human beings on one another, but it is an inner struggle of the American soul to free itself from the contradictions of its own fallacies about the nature of true democracy, freedom, and equality.

“The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” —MOHANDAS GANDHI

The most important lesson I have learned in the fifty years I have spent working toward the building of a better world is that the true work of social transformation starts within. It begins inside your own heart and mind, because the battleground of human transformation is really, more than any other thing, the struggle within the human consciousness to believe and accept what is true.

Faith, to me, is knowing in the solid core of your soul that the work is already done, even as an idea is being conceived in your mind. It is being as sure as you are about your dreams as you are about anything you know as a hard fact.

Faith is being so sure of what the spirit has whispered in your heart that your belief in its eventuality is unshakable. Nothing can make you doubt that what you have heard will become a reality. Even if you do not live to see it come to pass, you know without one doubt that it will be. That is faith.

We believed that if we are all children of the same Creator, then discrimination had to be an error, a misconception based on faulty logic. The idea that some people were inherently better was a delusion of the human ego, a distortion of the truth. We asserted our right to human dignity based on a solid faith in our divine heritage that linked us to every other human being and all the rest of creation, known and unknown, even to the heart and mind of God and the highest celestial realms in the universe.

Mother Teresa was asked where she found her strength, her focus, her fuel. The fuel, she explained, is prayer. “To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.”

We in the movement decided to actualize our belief that the hatred we experienced was not based on any truth, but was actually an illusion in the minds of those who hated us.

If faith had power, he declared, then its ability should be challenged to answer even our physical and material concerns and not be reserved for religious services and activities. If faith had meaning, its benefits should accrue not only after death, but it should have the capacity to answer the cries of humanity here and now.

Think about your greatest fear. Consider how you would feel if your life required you to face what you fear the most every day. Ultimately, if you survived the test, you would discover that what you feared actually had no power over you, no power to harm you at all.

“I don’t know what will happen now … But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I am not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.” —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Faith will be the lifeblood of all your activism, and it has the power to make a way out of no way.

When you pray, move your feet. —AFRICAN PROVERB

“Without patience, we will learn less in life. We will see less. We will feel less. We will hear less. Ironically, rush and more usually mean less.” —MOTHER TERESA

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

To most of us, patience seems almost too simple. In order to feel effective and in command, we require control that brings immediate results. We have a “fast-food mentality” that expects an instant return on our investment of time, attention, and effort, a return that is concrete and clear. We are so comfortable charging forward and succeeding through our aggression and innovation that the idea of patience can seem contrary to our instincts. Yet, I assure you, as I have seen through my very eyes: even a little patience can pay big dividends.

It is only through examining history that you become aware of where you stand within the continuum of change.

I meet so many ambitious young politicians and leaders who want to jump to the head of the line. They do not know how we arrived at this point in our history as a nation, but they believe they should be appointed to lead us into the future. They think that because they are educated, articulate, and talented someone should usher them down the red carpet to a throne of leadership. But real leaders are not appointed. They emerge out of the masses of the people and rise to the forefront through the circumstances of their lives. Either their inner journey or their human experience prepares them to take that role. They do not nominate themselves. They are called into service by a spirit moving through a people that points to them as the embodiment of the cause they serve.

is important for upcoming activists to study American history, as well as political and philosophical thought.

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” —MOHANDAS GANDHI

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” —ROBERT F. KENNEDY

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” —WINSTON CHURCHILL

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

The old foe of separation still runs rampant in a game-playing society. A belief in the game suggests there is no relationship between the hoodwinked and the deceiver. The robber barons of today’s mortgage fraud might have believed they got away with millions, but the tanking of our economy devalues all they stole. Nothing can break that inextricable bond between us all. Consequences can be delayed, maybe even softened, but not avoided. If one goes up, we can all rise. But if many fall, the height of the summit will be diminished.

Those two brothers began their term as president and attorney general without a real understanding of the problems of race in the South. But through the protests and the demonstrations they came to understand how deeply we suffered. They began to hear the mandate to address the very hypocrisy Dr. King spoke about. These men grew. They changed because of what they experienced, and that is all you can ask of another person. Don’t close your eyes because you are afraid of what you will see. Be honest in your assessment. Transformation and revelation require an adjustment from what we know to what we know can be.

He was a simple preacher from Atlanta, Georgia, but he transformed an entire nation by standing on the power of the truth.

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” —BUDDHA

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

None are free until all are free. That was their faith and motto.

Dr. King used to say that nothing can stop the marching feet of a committed and determined people armed with an idea whose time has come.

In his March on Washington speech in 1963, Dr. King put it this way: “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”

Soul force is the ability to counter the forces of injustice with fearlessness, knowing that your soul is connected to the greatest force in the universe.

To gain a judicial solution, a lawyer must advocate for the issue you are seeking to address judicially. Legal organizations, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (once headed by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Asian American Defense and Education Fund, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, litigate social justice matters.

Activists must take into account Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, or you might call it a law of action. Newton says that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. That means that when activists take a stand, they must accurately anticipate the response to their action. This is one of the most important lessons you can learn from the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. We were successful in creating massive change in our society, but we did not fully comprehend the nature of the opposition. They were just as insistent as we were. As civil rights activists began to believe they had won some immutable victories and relaxed their efforts, the conservatives, many supporting the election of Richard Nixon in 1968, began engaging in strategies similar to our own.

Your opponent is not a single person, but the forces of violence, separation, and division. Recognize that people have the power to change. If people are convinced of the worthiness of your cause, soul-to-soul communication is the pathway to changing hearts and minds. Take action that demonstrates the dignity and humanity of your cause and you may find yourself the leader of an effective movement. That is the difference between a dream and a plan.

“Peace is softening what is rigid in our hearts. We can talk about ending war and we can march for ending war, we can do everything in our power, but war is never going to end as long as our hearts are hardened against each other.” —PEMA CHÖDRÖN, PRACTICING PEACE IN TIMES OF WAR

We are emerging from what some historians have termed the “violent century.” Several researchers have declared the last one hundred years to be the bloodiest period in contemporary history. In May of 2010, Economist magazine featured a cover story on a phenomenon it called “gendercide” in Asian countries like China and India, involving the killing of at least one hundred million baby girls due to the cultural belief that they are less valuable than boys. Close to thirty-three million soldiers were killed in the wars of the twentieth century. Fifty-four million civilians were killed in conflict zones, and estimates are that between eighty million and one hundred and seventy million people were murdered because of political oppression, intentional famine, and government-inflicted deaths. Some writers have dubbed the times we now live in as “the age of hate.”

As I have reflected on my life and the intimate exposure I have had to the atrocities of hate, I conclude that the question is not who, but what. What is it about our psyche or makeup as human beings that invites us to project our fear upon one another, justify abuse to relieve our own anxieties, and then demonize the object of our ridicule? It is so strange to me that we have learned to fly in the air like birds, learned to swim in the ocean like fish, shoot a rocket to the moon, but we have not yet learned how to live together in harmony with one another.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Once we step outside of our belief in the need for violence and mandate the way of peace, we will discover pathways we have never tried, personally, locally, nationally, and internationally. There are technologies of peace; there are the research and methodologies of peace. There are the intelligence and industries of peace. They exist; we simply have to decide to explore them. The 2010 rescue of coal miners in Chile trapped beneath the earth taught us a powerful lesson. Once we decide collateral damage to any form of life is not an acceptable outcome, it is not hard to devise means and mechanisms to preserve life rather than cast it away as though it is expendable. We already know the way; we just have to exercise the will.

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” —NELSON MANDELA

Martin Luther King Jr. said that peace is not the absence of tension, but the presence of justice. It is not the cessation of war that brings peace; it is justice that brings peace, even in the midst of struggle.

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” —NELSON MANDELA

“We are all bound by the ties of love…Even as there is cohesive force in blind matter so much must there be in all things animate and the name for that cohesive force among animate beings is Love.” —MOHANDAS GANDHI, YOUNG INDIA, OCTOBER 6, 1921

I like to use the analogy of one house to describe our kinship to all humankind. We all live together in the same house—in different rooms, perhaps, but under the same roof and within the same walls. If one section of our house begins to rot—a basement, a back room, a closed-off closet—the entire structure is in danger of collapsing.

To reconcile ourselves with one another, we must release our judgments and make peace with the fact that we are one. This country was founded on the ideal that we are all created equal. If we truly believe in the equality of all humankind, how can we put down and belittle one another? How can we disrespect and prejudge one another? How can we come to the point where we malign and hate one another?