Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

by John Lewis

“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.