All About Change - Civil Rights Leader John Lewis and the Power Of Non-Violence with Brenda Jones

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

For 15 years, Brenda Jones worked with late Congressman and Civil Rights icon John Lewis. Brenda talks with Jay about Lewis's legacy of non-violent activism and its effectiveness. Listen now!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think Congressman Lewis was a categorically unique individual who had always been his faith that could break the back of the segregated system. All Inclusive, a podcast on inclusion, innovation, and social justice with Jay Ruderman. Hi, I'm Jay Ruderman, and this is All Inclusive, a podcast focused on inclusion, innovation, and social justice. Longtime civil rights activist and veteran congressman John Lewis, who passed away in July 2020, is an icon. Lo loved and respected for his actions and leadership in the civil rights movement since the early 1960s. Although already well known in the African American community and amongst his peers in Washington, D.C., Brenda Jones, his communications director,

is credited by the press as one of the key people responsible for solidifying Lewis's public image and making him a household name in the United States and abroad. Brenda also co-authored with Lewis the book Across That Bridge, Lewis's biography. Before we dive into Congressman Lewis's career as a civil rights activist, how did you become his communications director? Essentially, before I even met Congressman Lewis, my husband and I went on what we called a civil rights tour to the Deep South because I had never been to places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. And so he had a medical conference in Nashville and we decided to take a tour by car from Nashville to New Orleans and back. And at the time, we were reading Congressman Lewis's biography. And it is very informative about all of the different sites in the South where many, many important things happened. It's called Walking with the Wind. And so that was that. My husband subsequently passed away.

I'm sorry. Yes. But I was literally sitting at home thinking to myself, Brenda, what are you going to do? A friend of mine had gotten a job in Congressman Lewis's office and called me and said, Brenda, had gotten a job in Congressman Lewis's office and called me and said, Brenda, this is a job I think you should try for. So I did. That day ended up being the first anniversary of my husband's death, the day that I had the interview for this job. And that day, I actually had a flat tire on the way to the House of Representatives. So it was a very difficult day for me because of my husband's death, very emotional. And I was really feeling negatively. I was thinking, I'm not going to get this job. And then I had a flat tire and I thought all these impediments,

I had a flat tire and I thought all these impediments, things aren't going well. When I got there, I just decided to put everything out of my mind, not a perfectionist that I am, condemn myself for anything that happened, but just be there in the moment and have a good interview, be positive. It it worked. We had a conversation that lasted about an hour and a half. And then the chief of staff said to me, can you meet the congressman tomorrow? So I said, yes, of course. And we met at a Starbucks that is very close to where the congressman used to live on Pennsylvania, 3rd and Pennsylvania Avenue, Southeast in DC. So I went upstairs and the congressman and his chief of staff were sitting at a small table and I just sat down at the table. The interesting thing about Congressman Lewis is that he is a very warm, gentle, engaging person. His presence was very, very powerful. So you knew you were in the

presence of someone who was special, but he himself was a very mild-mannered person and really easy to engage. He wasn't dramatic or overpowering or anything that you think would be what an important influential public figure was like. He just simply asked me questions and I answered them. And he said to me, because this was in 2003 during the Bush administration. And he said to me, why are you interested in getting into politics at this time? Because of course, it was a period of deconstruction of many of the things that he was involved in. And I said to him, well, I wouldn't just work for any politician, but you are a person who's put your life on the line so that I could be there, so that we could participate in the political process, so that millions of people would have an entrance to democracy in America. And I think that did it. He said, well, okay, you talk to my chief of staff, and I got the job.

It must have been emotional, but at the same time, it sounds like he really put you at ease. Absolutely. He was someone who moved around the House of Representatives. He spoke to everybody, literally everybody, policemen, people who are picking up the trash, receptionists, everybody. He gave everyone his attention and respect. That was something that was very important to him, that people were respected for their dignity and their worth, every human being. I remember when I first got there, for some reason, when I first got there, for some reason, there were elevator operators in the Cannon Building. And when I told her who I was working for, she got very enthusiastic, which was true,

working for him. But this was one of my first experiences with that. And she said to me, she said, Brenda, I have always wanted to pinch Congressman Lewis's cheeks. He has the most amazing, you know, cheeks. And I said, well, it's true. He does have baby cheeks. So we talked about this, you know, and then later, I think it was maybe a day after, the congressman came into the office and he asked for me, which, of course, I was a new employee. So that didn't happen very frequently in the very beginning. And he said, I talked to, he mentioned the name of the elevator operator. I can't remember her name, but he said, I talked to so-and-so, you know, this person. And I was so embarrassed. I thought, oh no, what did she say? And he said, she told me what you all said. And I thought, oh my God, you know, he's thinking, you know, I don't know what he's thinking. I told her he has baby cheeks. And I said, well, did you let her pinch your cheeks? And he said, yes. He was an engaging person. He really, he loved people. And, you know, he was a very open, engaging, creative person.

open, engaging, creative person. So let's take us back to the early 60s. Congressman Lewis was well known for his philosophy of nonviolent activism, as you've said, which he sometimes referred to as good trouble. And an example of this was that he was one of the key organizers for what was known as the Freedom Rides from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. Now, for the benefit of some of our younger listeners who may not know this history, can you briefly talk about the story of these rides? Yes. Well, the Freedom Rides occurred sort of in the early to the middle of the civil rights activism of the 1960s. So at this point, Congressman Lewis had already been a successful participant in the Nashville sit-in movement, where they, through a process of sit-ins, had desegregated downtown Nashville. So what happened was there was a Supreme Court decision that essentially stated in interstate travel, which of course is managed by the federal government, desegregation was illegal. And as many of you may know, in the 1960s before 1964, before the advent of the Civil

Rights Act, it was illegal against the law in certain Southern states, most of the states of the old Confederacy, for African Americans and white people to share a seat on a bus. And the Montgomery bus boycott was part of trying to break that law, trying to demonstrate that it was immoral. And so that had been successful in the Montgomery boycott but there were still all of these states throughout the south where it was illegal so what would happen is if you were traveling say from Boston to Montgomery Alabama once you got across the Mason-Dixon line everybody would switch seats so that white people were sitting next to each other and black people were sitting next to each other at the back of the bus. And if that didn't happen, you could literally be arrested and taken to jail.

So what these individuals did, and Congressman Lewis was on the first Freedom Ride. He was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders. They were attempting to ride from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana. The next day, May 4th, we boarded a Greyhound bus and some boarded a Trailway bus leaving Washington DC as an integrated group. The first real incident occurred in a little town called Rock Hill, South Carolina, about 35 miles from Charlotte, North Carolina. When my seatmate, the two of us tried to enter a so-called white waiting room. My seatmate was a young white gentleman. And once they got into a variety of cities like Rock Hill, North Carolina, for example,

they were met by violent and angry mobs led by the Ku Klux Klan. In some instances, they were dragged off of these buses. They were beaten. And you can see many stories of them, including Congressman Lewis and his seatmate, Jim's work, who experienced a disability that he has to this day from the beating in those rides and their bloody faces during this encounter. And members of the Klan attacked us and left us lying in a pool of blood. They left us bloody. The freedom riots continue.

These were mainly young people, students, who decided to take on this kind of activism, and they all had to write out their wills. They knew that they could all be killed, and in order to participate, they had to write out their last will and testament. And somewhere, somebody has Congressman Lewis's, the letter that he wrote saying what he wanted to do, or what he wanted to have done if he was to be killed. And they got as far as Mississippi in many cases, in Congressman Lewis's case, in many cases, in Congressman Lewis's case, they were arrested en masse in Mississippi. So they sent hundreds of people on buses to Mississippi and they would all be arrested and put in jail. So in the end, I think it was like two or 300 people were imprisoned in Mississippi. were imprisoned in Mississippi. They decided not to accept bail because they wanted to make a point. And so they stayed there for about 30 days in Parchman Penitentiary to make the point that this kind of practice was wrong. At that time, the world was watching. They had gained the world's attention of the segregation,

the racism, and the hatred that was going on in the southern part of the United States at that time. So their technique of not accepting bail and staying in prison was gaining a lot of attention. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it was ultimately what it gave rise to was the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that effectively ended segregation, legalized segregation. It is no longer legal for someone, a public organization. You can privately, you can still ban people privately, but publicly, you cannot segregate. During one of these protests, Congressman Lewis was badly beaten by a mob and arrested, as you said, by the state police, but yet he insisted on nonviolent protests in the face of such violence. Can you explain why? I mean, some people, when faced with violence, are going to react with violence, and yet he and his followers never did, and in doing so, you know, probably gained the moral high ground, but it must have

been such a difficult thing to go through, to be beaten and to be injured and not fight back. I think Congressman Lewis was a categorically unique individual who had always been seeking a way to engage the power of love and a spiritual means, a means that was morally consistent with his belief and his faith that could break the back of the segregated system. He had long been, as a child, really resistant to and unable to comply with segregation and complained frequently to his parents that it was wrong. And so when he heard Martin Luther King Jr. on a radio one Sunday when he was 15 years old, he took hold of this philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. So even as a young person, I think he was very captivated by this and this made it easier for him than maybe other people say you or me who have a different kind of orientation, to accept nonviolence as a means to change, to transition and change. Can you talk a little bit about Congressman Lewis's relationship with Dr. King?

I mean, they were of different ages, but they obviously knew each other. Yes, he adored Martin Luther King Jr. Because he says that Martin Luther King Jr. essentially gave him and hundreds, maybe even thousands of others, a way out or a way in, depending upon how you want to look at it. depending upon how you want to look at it. He was someone who grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama, who knew something was deeply wrong in our society, who wanted to do something about it, but he didn't have the means. He didn't have a mechanism by which he could create change. And Martin Luther King Jr. embodied, symbolized, and executed the capacity to make a change that freed millions of Americans, not just, you know, Civil Rights Act of 1964 affected not only African Americans, but all Americans, as did the Voting Rights Act of 65. And so he deeply admired Dr. King. And in fact, he wrote to Dr. King when he was a young man. So

when he was 15, he heard King on the radio and he immediately went out and engaged a protest. He took all of his cousins and brothers and sisters down to the public library and asked to get a library card. And the librarian told him, he said very nicely, that it was not possible for him to have a library card because he was an African American. And so they left the library and he liked to say that he didn't return to that library until they gave him a book talk related to his first book, Walking with the Wind. And when he came there and gave the talk, they gave him a library card. So Congressman Lewis learned the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence at the feet of some masters, men who were deeply, deeply committed to nonviolence in any circumstance. And when in Rock Hill, North Carolina, for example, he was beaten and you see those famous pictures of him and Jim's work standing there with bloody faces. They asked him, do you want to press charges? And he and Jim's work said, no,

said no. Our interest is not in revenge or meeting out punishment, but we are trying to demonstrate to people that violence is not the way. This is not how we should engage with each other. So they didn't press charges and he was willing to get beaten and arrested many times to serve a greater cause. So let's go back to the time again. Obviously, there is this very powerful, very influential movement of nonviolence in the civil rights movement that's grabbing hold. But maybe you can talk about the reaction of the African American community at the time to this philosophy of nonviolence. Were there others, other activists who took a different take and said, no, we're going to meet violence with violence? I think most of the civil rights movement actually was nonviolent. Even if you're talking about aspects in the North

related to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, for example, even the Black Panthers were not violent. They believed in self-defense. So they didn't go out and create violence, but they did say, unlike Congressman Lewis's branch of the movement, if you are violent toward me, I am going to defend myself. So I think the reason that nonviolence really took hold in the Southern United States is because the relationships between African Americans and white communities was very intertwined in the South, mainly because it's an agricultural community. So there's an interdependence that has to occur. You need many, many people to farm your crops. And most of those people were African-American people. So there was an interesting kind of interplay between African-Americans and white Americans in the South that made nonviolence resonate. Also,

the South was then and still is very Christian in its orientation. So anything that a minister said was taken as nearly as the truth in the South, especially at that time. And many of these individuals, I mean, essentially civil rights movement was a movement of ministers. And so because of the backdrop of that teaching in the South and the influence that it had, and the fact that all of these things occurred in churches. There were many, many people who accepted and took on the charge to engage in nonviolent protests. Young people, children, mothers, fathers, doctors, lawyers, they all had to engage in these massive protests in order for nonviolent protests in order for the movement to be successful. And they did. They did do that. Let's talk about love for a moment, because there was an interesting incident where one of the thugs who attacked Congressman Lewis during the Freedom Rides was a man named Elwin Wilson.

And in 2009, Wilson and Congressman Lewis met again, but this time under very different circumstances. By the time you were already working for Congressman Lewis as his communications director, what can you tell us about this extraordinary meeting and how it came to be it was a journalist for a newspaper in rock hill south carolina that i had interacted with before on other stories who got in touch with me and he said brenda there is a man in rock hill who was part of the mob that beat Congressman Lewis, and he would like to apologize. So I told Congressman Lewis about this, and he was immediately receptive.

Many years later, and I remember this happened in May 1961. years later and I remembered this happened in May 1961 the local police officials came up and wanted to know whether we wanted to press charges we said no we come with peace and love and non-violence in May of February, rather, 09, one of the members of the clan who had beat us came to my Washington office. He heard through a reporter that I was there. Came with his son. His son was in his 40s.

He was in his 70s. He said, Mr. Lewis, I'm one of the people that attacked you in your seat, mate. I want to apologize. Will you forgive me? I said, yes, I accept your apology. Yes, I forgive you. He started crying. His son started crying.

They hugged me. I hugged them back, and He started crying. The sons started crying. They hugged me. I hugged them back and I started crying. And Elwin Wilson, he was a really interesting man. Apparently when Barack Obama was was elected to the presidency, that had an impact on Elwynn Wilson. And he was elderly by this time and thinking about the fact that he wasn't going to be here forever. And so he told a friend of his that he was concerned that he might not ascend when he died, but actually might go a place that he was concerned about. And his friend said to him, well, it's not too late. It's not too late for you to rectify some of the things that you had done. And so he set about apologizing to a variety of people. He had been a member of the Klan, so a variety of people who he had injured, but the only person he wasn't able to reach was Congressman Lewis. And this reporter

said to him, well, I know how to get in touch with him. And that's what happened. Elwin Wilson was a very interesting man. I'm sorry that he passed away. That is the power of the way of peace. The power of the way of love. The power of the way of nonviolence. To be reconciled.

In the final analysis, we are one people, we are one family, we all live in the same house, not just American house, but the world house. I must tell you tonight that in spite of 40 arrests, jailings, been beaten and left not only bloody in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, where I was hit in the head by a member of an angry mob with a wooden Coca-Cola crate. I'm still hopeful, still optimistic.

And I said to you here tonight that we must never ever give up. We must never ever give in. We must never get lost in a sea of despair. We must keep the faith. In spite of being arrested and going to jail 40 times during the 60th and been arrested five times since I've been in the Congress. I'm not going to turn back. And you must not turn back. You must not give up. You must not give in.

We can create the beloved community here, here in America. I want to switch gears finally and talk about another area of Congressman Lewis's activism, that's education. And in 2013, he released a graphic novel, essentially a comic called March, about the civil rights movement. How did this idea come about? And why did he choose a comic in the first place? Well, I don't think he was enamored of the idea in the beginning, but he had a member of his staff who was very involved in comic books and wanted Congressman Lewis to write a comic book with him. During the Montgomery bus boycott, a group released a comic book called Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story. And Congressman Lewis remembered how impactful that comic book was during the Montgomery years.

And so I think that was influential in his knowing that a comic book could reach people that a video or a book, a 300-page biography would not. And his interest was always in reaching out as far as he could to anybody who could listen to a message about peace, nonviolence, and government, getting engaged in government and politics. So ultimately, I think he was convinced that this is something he should try. And he was a very creative man, unbeknownst to most people. He loved innovation. He loved technology. He loved new ideas. There were many instances where he was engaged. We did liner notes to a record. He was included in rap videos. He was included in little cameos on television series. So he was open to and interested in any kind of creative way to reach young people.

You worked with Congressman Lewis for 15 years. How did he change your life and your own views on activism and making an impact in the world. That is very interesting. I think he really symbolized and demonstrated to me the power of nonviolence. a city that was more engaged in using power to push back against things that happened to you, to take a stand, to be confrontational. And it wasn't until I started working with him that I really realized that kind of philosophy had really emerged from the civil rights movement. And he taught me how the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence is a more, really, I think more effective strategy than confrontation. Not that nonviolence is not

confrontational, it is. But if you can confront with the kind of wisdom that looks toward the future resolution that needs to come, then really you are engaging the truth in a way that cuts through all of the difficulty, the ups and downs, everything you're going to face before you get to that point. So I think that's why a lot of people worked for him for a long absorbed something in his presence, unnameable, that you just couldn't receive elsewhere. He was just a great, really extraordinary individual. Well, Brenda, it's been a pleasure speaking to you today. Very informative, And I really appreciate your time. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for keeping the life of John Lewis alive. He is a great man. He represents so much that we need to understand. So I'm glad you are interested in talking about it. Thank you. Thank you.

interested in talking about. Thank you. Thank you. All Inclusive is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. Our key mission is the full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society. You can find All Inclusive on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher. To view the show notes, transcripts, or to learn more, go to rudermanfoundation.org slash allinclusive. Have an idea for a podcast? Be sure to tweet at Jay Ruderman.