Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change

by John Lewis

Governments and corporations do not live. They have no power, no capacity in and of themselves. They are given life and derive all their authority from their ability to assist, benefit, and transform the lives of the people they touch. All authority emanates from the consent of the governed and the satisfaction of the customer.

Whenever the people finally reject the efforts to fragment their collective energies into warring factions and remember their divine union with one another, when they throw off material distractions and irrelevant negativity and hear their souls speak with one voice, they will rise up. And whatever is in their path will either transform or transpire.

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.

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.

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.

How did you hold to nonviolence when a pounding wall of vicious hate was pushing through you like waves of fire during the protests and sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement? How is it possible to be cracked on the head with a nightstick, left bleeding and unconscious on the trampled grass, and not raise your hand one time in self-defense? How could you bear the clear hypocrisy of being arrested on trumped-up charges and taken to jail for disturbing the peace when you were the one who was attacked and abused? How could you survive the unanswered threats, the bombings, and murders of a lineage of people, like Medgar Evers, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, without holding any bitterness or anger? The answer is simple. Faith. Faith has the power to deliver us all, even from the greatest harm.

Faith is being so sure of what the spirit has whispered in your heart that your belief in its eventuality is unshakable.

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. They were good, plain and simple, undeserving of hate.

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.

We had nothing to prove. Our worth had already been established before we were born.

We believed that if we were the children of an omniscient Creator and we took a stand based on faith, that the forces of the universe would come to our aid. No jail cell, no threat, no act of violence could alter our power to overcome any adversary, if we did not waver.

The struggle for civil rights was more than a series of legal battles. It was a spiritual confrontation that tested the power of two ideas—one based on unity and the other based on division. Our faith rejected the notion that some people were inherently better than others because of skin color, hair, height, build, education, class, or religion, or any external attribute, and it embraced the equality and divinity of all humanity.

So many of our parents stayed on their knees and made sure we learned to pray that we were already familiar with the power of divine grace that would meet us in our darkest hour and somehow, someway seemed to stretch the span of our universe to make two short ends meet.

We called it “making a way out of no way.” So when we were standing in protest facing police dogs and fire hoses, we knew without any doubt that somebody who was greater than us all would make a way out of no way and protect the defenders of the truth.

The role of the church cannot be understated here, and you can expand the concept of church to mean the communion of believers. It has been well documented that the church was a wellspring of common faith for most of us in the movement. It was no accident that the movement was led primarily by ministers—not politicians, presidents, or even community activists—but ministers...

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.

Each and every one of us is imbued with a divine spark of the Creator. That spark links us to the greatest source of power in the universe. It also unites us with one another and the infinity of the Creation. If we stand on this knowledge, even if it is in direct conflict with the greatest forces of injustice around us, a host of divine help, both seen and unseen, will come to our aid.

“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.”