Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

by John Lewis

The restless call for change blew constantly through my mind and disturbed my peace as a boy growing up in the cotton fields of Alabama. I was like a little wisp of dust wafting in a sea of adversity, a black boy trying to get the kind of education that would lead to better opportunity crashing against the rock-hard heart of the Jim Crow South. That was a bitter, harsh experience that made me feel as though the world was set against me. I think that is how some people feel today struggling against the worst economic odds we have seen in eighty years, losing their homes, their jobs, and their pensions. They can’t seem to get ahead. The deck seems persistently stacked against them. I understand the sense of helplessness and hopelessness that can surround a people who feel thwarted at every turn. I could not have been farther away from the halls of Congress or the chambers of the Supreme Court as a small boy in Alabama. Back then I could not choose my seat on a bus or sit down at a lunch counter to eat, and blacks certainly didn’t have the access to vote. No provision had been made for me and others like me to communicate the dictates of our conscience to the leadership of a nation. We had to build that road ourselves. We made a way out of no way to free ourselves from oppression and bring an American society one step closer to realizing its pledge: “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing...

Each generation must continue to struggle and begin where the last left off. The sprouting of activist groups and angry sentiments represents a growing sense of discontent in America and around the world. These human beings represent a growing feeling of dissatisfaction that the community of nations is spending the people’s resources on more bombs, missiles, and guns and not enough on human needs. People are crying out. They want to see the governments of the world’s nations humanize their policies and practices. They want to see business leaders and their corporations be more humane and more concerned about the problems that affect the whole of the world’s population, rather than just the overrepresented rich. Some activists today may not seem as focused, prepared, or organized as we were in the Civil Rights Movement, but they are getting there. Every successful movement needs to have achievable goals to give the people involved some victories. That keeps them focused, keeps them going. I cannot predict what kind of change will come. I cannot offer marching orders for a new band of liberators. But I can boil down some of what I know into an essence that can be molded into the structures that you will ultimately create. That is why this little book is divided into a collection of truths that I have discovered are fundamental to the inner transformation that must be realized to affect lasting social change. I have gleaned these ideas from my own formative experiences, from ...

There is still a great deal of work to do today in the Yazoo Delta and the state of Mississippi, but because of a band of brothers and sisters empowered by their faith, the hands that picked cotton in Mississippi are now picking presidents of the United States. Despite the remaining vestiges of segregation, evidently our faith did move mountains because Mississippi has more elected representatives of African American descent today than any other state in the union.

Ultimately, our strategy worked. After years of waiting, we exposed the injustice of our opposition. The voting rights struggle in Alabama ended with what some legal scholars have called the most effective piece of legislation the U.S. Congress had passed in over fifty years: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Previously, President Lyndon Johnson had advised us it would be impossible to pass another bill on the heels of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination in public accommodations illegal. But because of the people of Selma, Alabama, and the thousands who supported them, because of the people who demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt the pressing need for justice, Johnson was able to send a voting rights bill to the floor of the House. When he introduced the bill, he said these unforgettable words, which I often repeat in my speeches today: “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.” The people of Selma wrote that act with their marching feet. It was their determination to wait without ceasing that dramatically altered American history. The Voting Rights Act outlawed literacy tests and grandfather clauses, but it also provided for periodic reauthorization to curtail present-day efforts to limit free and fair access to the ballot box. It allowed...

In the meantime, regardless of all these setbacks, in every session of Congress I persisted in introducing the legislation. I did this for over a decade with no results, still undaunted in my belief that this was the right thing to do, and on my watch I was determined to do my part to make it happen. We saw many new museums built on the mall: the African Art Museum, the Air and Space Museum, the Museum of the American Indian, and many more in this time. I hired a very enterprising legislative director, Tammy Boyd, who began working on every angle to get the bill through. Finally, in 2001, I introduced a bill authorizing the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in conjunction with Rep. J. C. Watts of Oklahoma on the House side. Sens. Max Cleland of Georgia and Sam Brownback of Kansas agreed to introduce the same bill on the Senate side. The bill provided $15 million for planning and operations and $10 million for educational programs. The bill was finally passed by Congress. A presidential commission was formed to study the contentious issues regarding site placement. I had introduced the same bill in Congress for fifteen years; Rep. Leland had done his part in the years before me; and the entire effort had begun eighty-eight years before. But the bill was finally signed into law in 2003. The National Museum of African American History and Culture will be built on the National Mall, scheduled to be completed in 2015, a full 100 years after the idea was f...

Most people who are raised under the oppression of social discrimination can recall the exact moment when they realized others saw them as different.

Each uprising of the people informs and seeds the others, especially in the age of the Internet. In Tunisia, word of an act of righteous indignation—a vendor who set himself on fire to protest the unjust confiscation of his property—spread like wildfire over Facebook and ultimately ended the regime of a tyrant. During the Civil Rights Movement, we didn’t have the Internet. We did not have iPhones or computers. We didn’t even have fax machines. We had no power of celebrity, no money. But we had ourselves. So we used what we had. We put our bodies on the line for simple justice and social change. We did all we could, and by the power of grace, it was enough to create transformation. Our poise was not founded on money, breeding, or education, but rather on our spiritual lineage and unbreakable connection to the divine. What we could not muster was added through a grace that never failed, a stream of consciousness that was never interrupted by external circumstance. The spirit adds what we cannot offer to an end result that is more in keeping with the dictates of the universe. Any activist must have faith in this spiritual legacy, that in the work of change, we are not alone, but there are forces that assist us and act in concert with us. I will never forget our march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, before we met the sea of blue Alabama state troopers on the other side. We walked two by two, totally in faith, not knowing what our end would be. We were silent. Just six hundred...

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” —WINSTON CHURCHILL The truth is a powerful force. It is the foundation of all things. The truth is so all consuming that it cannot be denied. You cannot erase the truth. You cannot tarnish the truth. You cannot whitewash the truth. It is bigger than the sum of us all, and whole, even in its parts. And yet, even though the truth can’t be denied or erased, it can be systemically obscured, strategically misinterpreted, and hidden from mainstream comprehension. Our faith in the movement was that we could peel back the falsehood of all our conditioning, scrape away the hard, crusty cynicism of our politics, and peer through to the root of social dysfunction. That journey beyond the limits of normal discourse would lead to the central, simple principles of life, based on the unfathomable, massive bedrock of the truth. In SNCC, a “leaderless” organization, we viewed consensus as a guiding principle. Sometimes we would spend all night, even days as a group discussing the merits of one idea until all the opposition was quieted and all conflict subsided. Ultimately, the dissolution of SNCC, at its core, emanated around different perceptions of the truth.

I was born on a farm in rural Alabama into a family of sharecroppers, who had been working the cotton, corn, and peanut fields of Alabama for generations. Sharecropping took many forms in different states, but mainly it was a system designed to make us fail. Our work was undervalued, our debt inflated, making it almost impossible to get ahead. We were never paid a living wage, so we had to carry punishing debt to buy the necessary tools and supplies we needed in order to farm. To me, it was a vicious cycle I plainly perceived, even as a young boy, was intended to keep us in poverty. But living on that farm, enveloped by the contrasting purity and innocence of nature, often sequestered from a world that seemed tragically unjust and unfair, I searched inside myself and developed an ability to hear my inner voice speak. As a young boy, I joined the church, because I felt a calling to the ministry at an early age. I knew I wanted to preach, and my first sermon was to the chickens in the barnyard. I loved those gangly, clucking, cooing creatures. To me they seemed so defenseless and so naive. No one ever expected much of them. They were the least respected members of the barnyard. No one tried to distinguish them from one another. They didn’t even have names. They were voiceless, anonymous, invisible, and ultimately slaughtered. Perhaps I identified with their jeopardy, but somehow it became my mission as a young boy to offer them dignity and love. I would preach to them to for...

The first time I realized that the world saw me as inferior, a reject, a substandard creation is etched indelibly in my brain. I took a trip to the little town of Troy with my father. Troy was the place he would sell his share of the crops, settle his bills, and purchase new supplies. At six years old, this should have been a moment of pride for me. It was my first trip into town, a big deal for a country boy. It made me feel a bit older and a little more important to go on this journey with my dad. But the moment I left the nurturing circle of my community, my glee was slammed by the steel fist of hate. When we got to town, I could not help but notice the demeaning way my father was treated. He was the man I looked up to, loved, and respected, but he was assaulted by words and abuse, called “boy,” addressed by his first name, directed to submit to the worst violence and dared to mount any defense. And then there were the signs that dotted the entrances to so many businesses up and down Main Street. They screamed out a degradation that pursued me like a clanging indictment of my existence: white women, colored women, white men, colored men, white waiting, colored waiting. My skin color was a part of me I could never change, a characteristic I did not choose and was not responsible for, so this derision seemed hopeless to contain. It was as though the whole world was shouting out that I was defective, somehow poorly made. Those signs were humiliating—painful symbols that th...

Sometimes I think leaders today don’t realize how people hang on their words. People don’t want a handout most of the time. They just want a little help. They want the people who represent them to use a little power and a little influe...

We say that we want our leaders to tell us the truth, but are we prepared to make the sacrifices required once we hear that truth? Many candidates are afraid to speak the truth because they believe the people will reject the tough adjustments that might be called for—a cutback on services, a hike in taxes, a decision to put a halfway house in your neighborhood, to thin the population of urban deer, to close schools or military bases, or to lay people off. In order to get elected, many strategists actually recommend hiding the truth by using vague language or feel-good facts. The best approach, they would say, is to resurrect the old, familiar ghosts of our past. They are comfortable, nonthreatening, and fulfill the people’s need to verify the legends that support our national image of ourselves. Thus, it is not only the politicians, but the people, also, who participate in this grand denial because they don’t stay engaged and informed. They allow others to interpret the facts for them. They do no independent research. They are exhausted by critical thinking, yet they feel betrayed when they are confronted by corruption in politics that shatters their illusions. Politicians have a fiduciary responsibility to preserve the public’s trust. That goes without saying, and they are responsible when they lie or break the law. But the citizens of a democracy also have a responsibility to remain engaged and informed so they cannot be easily duped. How many man-on-the-street interview...

Our approach was not passive, as some people believed; it was uncompromising. Southerners saw it as forward and aggressive. Based on Mohandas Gandhi’s fundamental tactic, satyagraha, which means holding to the truth, or more literally, insistence on the truth, the sit-in confronted society and forced it to look in the mirror at its own reflection. Through our own independent study and our guided workshops with Rev. Jim Lawson, a man many called the mystic of the movement, we came to recognize that the pain of our social experience was in part due to our own acceptance of it. We all bore the psychic wounds of racism embedded in our being. This was no fault of our own. Blame was not the issue. Centuries of conditioning assured our compliance, and it was critical that we engage in a process that allowed us to perceive our complicity with this malicious order. Then we would be freed from knee-jerk responses to the hatred we had so intimately known, freed to map out our alliance with the truth.

They threw everything at us in the sixties in an attempt to deny the validity of our reality. They called us Communists and hippies, outside agitators and troublemakers. They infiltrated us and investigated us. They floated false rumors and negative propaganda. They ran us down with horses and bludgeoned us with billy clubs and baseball bats. They jailed us, they beat us, they bombed us, and sprayed us with tear gas and fire hoses. They even assassinated a president, a candidate, and a King. President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. were three symbols of hope. They were three men, three leaders who were sensitive to the truth.

In high school many study The Social Contract developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher influenced by other thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes (both from England), as well as Immanuel Kant of Germany and others during Europe’s Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason in the eighteenth century. This was a period when many of the modern ideas of democracy were born in the West. Of course, many African and Native American traditional cultures are rooted in democratic principles and many democratic ideals of ancient Greece and Rome emerged from the writings in the Great Library in Alexandria, Egypt. So the idea of government being accountable to the people is an ancient concept. However, in its modern form, Rousseau asserts that in order for government to exist at all, there is an implied agreement between the people and its government. The people agree to give up a part of their free will—the right to do as they please without rules. And under this unspoken contract, people determine that for the sake of order and peace, they will give up a part of their freedom and decide to follow the rules and regulations of government. They elect people to represent them in the processes of government so that they have a voice in the development of these rules, and that is a fundamental basis of any government, especially a democracy. So, the power of government comes not from itself but from the consent of the governed. That is, the people agree to be regulated by gove...