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by
John Lewis
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July 21 - August 16, 2020
Even I, who has looked down the barrel of a gun with only my faith to defend me, would say there is a unique hostility in these times that almost seems worse to me than what we experienced in the 1960s.
Today it seems there is no moral basis for anything we do as a society.
As a disenfranchised citizen who yearned for change, as a child born on the dark side of the American dream, I heard the whispers of the spirit calling me to wrestle with the soul of a nation.
They are beginning to awaken to an idea we gave meaning to in the sixties: 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?
As a nation we evolve by contending with the consequences of our decisions to reach that point where the collective mind is not tempted by injustice. Those of my philosophical framework call this process “building a Beloved Community.”
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.
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.
I had lived inside the irrationality of hatred and discrimination, and I had seen that it made no sense.
I saw the dignity of the most American of virtues displayed all around my community in the actions of my family and friends. My parents, their parents before them, and my great-grandparents were hardworking, honest, humble, family-centered people. They had an innate intelligence that was unrecognized by society, and they used an inspiring creativity to survive, even thrive.
And when the driver told her she would be arrested, perhaps you recall her words were, “You may do that.” She was asserting her power over her own destiny, giving the driver permission to do what she was allowing him to do, not what he was forcing her to do.
After the initial fear, each protest became an exercise in freedom instead of a cause for alarm.
By the time I stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, I had no fear of physical harm or death. So when people ask me how I managed my fear in that moment, I can truthfully say I was not afraid. I knew by that time that no one had the power to injure me. I had taken that power away by experiencing the worst they could do and discovering it did not diminish me; it did not harm me; it set me free and moved my soul beyond the fear of death.
We had no idea what would happen to us when we were arrested and taken to Parchman Farm. We did have a plan, however. Our strategy was that we would not post bail. We would stay incarcerated the entire forty-day term. At the same time, more Freedom Riders would attempt to ride through Mississippi. Knowing they would be arrested, our strategy was to flood the penal system until it overflowed with Americans calling for justice. Just like protestors recently swarmed the state capitol in Wisconsin, we filled the jails in the heart of Mississippi, insisting that our incarceration was wrong. In the
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Waiting acknowledges that we are not prime movers in all things. It concedes that there are some factors that lie beyond our control, and any well-considered plan must find a way to manage the unmanageable, to somehow measure and account for the unforeseeable and the unknown, including the work of social change.
Some states used what was called a “grandfather clause” to retard our progress after the Fifteenth Amendment passed: Anyone whose grandfather had the right to vote before the Civil War could continue to exercise that right without any impediment. But if a person’s grandfather had not been eligible before the war, then he or she had to take a so-called “literacy test” in order to qualify to register to vote in federal elections. Obviously, none of our grandfathers fell into the first category so we had to be prepared to take that test.
To register in Alabama, a person had to fill out a four-page application that was developed by the White Citizens Council, a coalition of businessmen, government officials, and prominent citizens who collectively imposed economic sanctions against any black person who even attempted to register; they could be fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, foreclosed upon by banks or other lenders. The council made it easy to discover who these folks were. Since the registrar’s office was open only during business hours on the first and third Monday of each month, they had to ask for time off
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In Dallas County, where Selma is the county seat, there were fifteen thousand eligible African American voters; by early 1965 only three hundred of them were registered to vote.
Despite all our organization and action, the key to our access to the ballot box was in someone else’s hands.
We reduced the danger of brutality by ensuring that the national media were well informed of our intentions. On some occasions, they joined us as observers, keeping a watchful eye, not realizing they were indirectly protecting us from the potential of greater physical abuse.
Our desire was not to register at any cost, if the price was sacrificing our dignity and self-respect. It is important to understand that we weren’t in the business of destruction. We wanted to build and not tear down, to unify and not divide, to love and not plant the seeds of hate.
We never raised our fists. All we did was wait, but that waiting acted like a ramrod that broke down the doors of resistance. It reflected poorly on Sheriff Clark and his men. We were very aware that our civility demonstrated above all the absurdity of brutalizing peaceful, law-abiding citizens and detaining them from exercising their constitutional rights. One day, Sheriff Clark called me an “outside agitator” and “the lowest form of humanity.” I told him, “Sheriff, I may be an agitator but I am not an outsider. I grew up only forty miles from here, and these people are going to stay here
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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. Congre...
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“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.”
Certainly creative nonviolent protests timed to impact legislative actions like important votes or hearings are strategic options.
Education might also be one of the most important tools that an organized, determined people need to institute change. People need to be informed about the legislative process and the structure of our government.
So viewed another way, it could be perceived that the logjam making people frustrated with government today is not a demonstration that “Washington is broken,” as so many pundits like to say, but that this system of checks and balances is working.
Be persistent and consistent in your activism and, most important, be patient.
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 first conceived.
Patience is a guiding light in all the work of change. It is an aspect of the commitment people make to finish what they start.
We used to say that ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.
And if we believe in the change we seek, then it is easy to commit to doing all we can, because the responsibility is ours alone to build a better society and a more peaceful world.
It is through study and preparation that you can increase the power of your work.
Most people who are raised under the oppression of social discrimination can recall the exact moment when they realized others saw them as different.
He never clamored to be rich, famous, the best dressed, or the most articulate. But he had a vision of how he wanted to serve and he moved toward that vision. He studied, prepared, and readied himself so that he was the most able servant available.
SOME PEOPLE ARE tracked down by what I call the spirit of history, to play a role in the evolution of humankind. My experience stands as a striking contrast to King’s very steady, visible path to leadership. In my case, it’s hard to draw a straight line that defines exactly how I came to lead. My story shows how the spirit can order a person’s steps. It can pluck him or her from the most unlikely place to stand on the front lines of change.
I went to school, but unlike King I could only go sporadically because there were times the fields had to be planted or harvested. The only money the local government contributed to the schooling of black children in Alabama was the teacher’s salary. A financially strapped black community had to pay for everything else. We used old, hand-me-down textbooks the whites no longer needed, and just one teacher was responsible for educating students in several different grades.
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 of us walking in a quiet persistence. To me, it felt like a holy march, so solemn, so reverent, so filled with unity and purpose. Though in the pictures we look so alone, I felt like there was a band of brothers and sisters, the seen and the unseen who marched with us. Our spirits joined with others through the ages who had determined to stand for
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“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” —WINSTON CHURCHILL
The quest for the truth was the center of Gandhi’s nonviolent activism.
From my earliest memories, I was fundamentally disturbed by the unbridled meanness of the world around me. Though I was not yet familiar with the words of the Declaration of Independence, I could feel in my bones that segregation was wrong, and I felt I had an obligation to change it.
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.
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 the world around me denied my worth.
Even though we had been rejected by society, we believed that all people had the capacity to be good.
That is the main reason we were particular about the way we dressed, because we wanted to be identified as upstanding citizens. The men wore suits and ties while the women looked dignified in conservative dresses. We had to be seen the way most Americans viewed themselves, helping to bridge the gap between any stereotype that perceived us as different and the truth that we were not.
Our method of demonstration in many instances was the sit-in because it was a simple, nonviolent act that illustrated the harmlessness of human connection, the innocence of sharing a meal at a lunch counter or a seat on a bus. The sit-in exposed the absurdity of barring the natural ability of people to flow to one another, and it revealed the monstrous, outlandish fear that had accumulated over centuries of compliance with injustice. Society had drawn a line in the sand, and we crossed it without apology.
Our approach was not passive, as some people believed; it ...
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insistence on the truth,
And the soul of each witness would wrestle with its own conscience and demand to be reconciled with the truth.
“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” —BUDDHA
