The Daily - The Life and Legacy of John Lewis

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

This episode includes disturbing language including racial slurs.Representative John Lewis, a stalwart of the civil rights era, died on Friday. We take a look at his life, lessons and legacy. Guest: Brent Staples, a member of the Times editorial board.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.Background reading: Mr. Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma, Ala., and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality, and who then carried a mantle of moral authority into Congress, died on Friday. He was 80.Bipartisan praise poured in for the civil rights leader, as friends, colleagues and admirers reached for the appropriate superlatives to sum up an extraordinary life.Mr. Lewis risked his life for justice, The Times’s editorial board wrote.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today, the life, lessons, and legacy of John Lewis. I spoke with my colleague, Times editorial board member Brent Stables. stables. It's Monday, July 20th. Brent, I want to start by going back with you to the time when John Lewis and others began engaging in nonviolent protests as part of the civil rights movement. Where were you during that period? Like everyone else at the time in the middle 60s, I was sitting with my parents watching television.

It's 11 p.m. and time for The Reporters and the News. Good evening. Bad news for Alabama today. Some school desegregation strategy has backfired. Policemen occasionally club demonstrators and use a variety of other tactics designed to break their spirit. And the nightly news of the scenes of people being ravaged by the police in the South in the streets. And I became attuned to the revolution that was unfolding in the South, where people had put themselves in harm's way to highlight the injustice of Southern apartheid. The sitters, white and Negro, spattered with ketchup and mustard, sugar, salt and pepper, were carted off on protesting to jail.

But as I became more politically active, I had difficulty, natural, probably natural difficulty, understanding how one would put oneself on the line to be actually beaten and bloodied and what the utility of that was. And by that time, the movement in the South had evolved somewhat. By 66, you begin to get the Black Power slogans. They don't want us to use Black Power. I got news for them. So I came into consciousness in my teens as a Black Power figure. Hmm. It is not a riot, it is a rebellion.

It was empowering. Number two, you ought to be proud of your black brothers and sisters at fifth because a hunky cop touched one of them and they told him you got to touch all of them. But it took some time into my late teens to begin to understand what had happened coming up to that. Mm-hmm.

And that is when I become aware of what had passed before when I was a younger kid. In other words, it took you some time to understand why the nonviolent figures had taken the approach that they had taken. Yes. So I want you to take us through John Lewis's life and how this philosophy you just described was shaped and how it evolved. So where does that story begin?

John Lewis, he grows up in rural Alabama, near Troy, Alabama. His parents initially were sharecroppers. And you know, sharecropping was a successor form of slavery. So John was born to that. And his parents were lucky. They saved enough money to buy a farm. But he graduated high school, segregated high school, and wanted to go to Troy State College, which didn't admit Black people. And he applied and sent in his information, and he never heard back. And he wrote a letter at one point to Martin Luther King, and I presume he wanted some help in desegregating Troy's state. And Martin Luther King sent him a round trip bus ticket. And he went and he met King and they formed a relationship.

The substance of that, I don't know, but it was extremely influential for John. And he left Troy not long after that and moved to Nashville. He went to seminary in Nashville, and there he met some of the early civil rights figures. He met James Lawson, Reverend James Lawson, who was kind of a philosopher of nonviolent resistance. Lawson had studied Gandhi's nonviolent movement and the strategies that Gandhi had deployed against Britain during the colonial period. And he'd come back with a deep sense of what the philosophy was and how powerful nonviolence could be. And what exactly is the philosophy? I have a John's memoir here. In 1958, I think it is, Jim Lawson mentions to him the idea of, quote, redemptive suffering. And he explains that it affects not only ourselves, but it touches and changes those around us as well.

It opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves, a force that is right and moral, the force of righteous truth that is the basis of human conscience. Suffering puts us and those around us in touch with our consciences. It opens and touches our hearts. around us in touch with our consciences. It opens and touches our hearts. It makes us feel compassion where we need to and guilt if we must. So this idea to him, this redemptive suffering, it is at the heart of the philosophy of nonviolent protest, at the very heart of it. This is a good paragraph in the book. One method of practicing this approach when faced with a hateful, angry, aggressive,

even despicable person is to imagine that person actually visualize him or her as an infant, as a baby. If you can see this full grown attacker who faces you as a pure innocent child that he or she once was, it's not hard to find compassion in your heart. But then it wasn't just a tactic. It was a way of life. It was embracing the biblical prescription

that one must love one's enemies. That's a biblical prescription that one must love one's enemies. That's a biblical prescription. And it's the hardest thing in the world to carry out. Well, so how do we start to see this get carried out among Lewis and these seminary students in Nashville? Well, Nashville was itself at the time another southern town where if you went into a restaurant and sat down, the people would just look at you and the waitress would say, sorry, this place doesn't serve niggers.

And that would generally be the end of it. But these students came into the place and sat down and asked to be fed. And when they were told that they were not served, they stayed. And they took a lot of abuse from it, and people spat upon them, beat them, battered them, and poured condiments over their heads, all kinds of things. And I remember our friend David Halberstam, our former colleague, was working at a newspaper there at the time. He was working at the Nashville Tennessean. And this is one of the things he wrote. The protests had been conducted with exceptional dignity, and gradually one image had come into prevail,

that of elegant, courteous young Black people holding to their Gandhian principles, seeking the most elemental of rights while being assaulted by young white hoodlums who beat them up and on occasion extinguish cigarettes on their bodies. So you see John Lewis and others being carried away in these really suits and ties and crisp white shirts and basically, you know, refusing to walk themselves, being completely passive and non-resistant. And this worked out extremely, I mean, in a very short period of time, it worked out extremely well in Nashville. After three months of sit-ins, the city basically caved and became the first major southern city to begin desegregating public facilities.

major southern city to begin desegregating public facilities. So very early on, the protest that John Lewis is beginning to participate in after he meets Martin Luther King and begins to understand this strategy, they are starting to show real signs of effectiveness. Oh, yeah. These peaceful, nonviolent protests. Exactly. violent protests. Exactly. Now, this is an astonishing thing to me today, to this day, because to practice the non-violent approach to life, to really embrace it,

one needs to understand that the person who was extinguishing a cigarette in your throat because you want to sit down at a lunch encounter, is as much a victim as you are. What John was saying, you, in pursuit of justice, you cannot let violence win your heart. That if you do that, you're surrendering really to the dark force that you're trying to defeat. Brent, you're reading from a memoir that is written in the later years of John Lewis's life. But my understanding is that this philosophy that he embraced and that he practiced, that it was not entirely a foregone conclusion that this would be the way that it went. And that the March on Washington is an example of a moment where we see a young John Lewis grappling with which path he's going to take.

Can you tell us the story of that speech? Well, you see, what I finally figured out is that by the time John Lewis, at the age of 23, gets to the March on Washington, this most important public gathering of Black people in the century, he has already been on the freedom rise. Integrated groups have taken buses into the Deep South to test laws that forbid segregation on interstate transport. He's been arrested on those trips for going into white-only bathrooms. He's been beaten just for being on buses with white people. In the end, John ends up being arrested like 40 times. And if you look at some of the pictures of the mug shots when he's arrested,

you can see him smiling. Because he's basically saying, you think you're afflicting me, but you're playing into what I want to do. But he's still 23 years old. That's all he is. And he basically comes into Washington with a speech. And this one somehow found its way into public. And one of the

striking things about it, he tells people to get into the street and stay in the street until the revolution is finished. And he names the sort of racist segregationist senators by name and state governors, too. Wow. I'm going to read from it. We won't stop now. All the forces of Eastland, Barnett, Wallace, Thurman won't stop this revolution. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently.

Wow. And to explain that reference, he's referring to the Union general who literally burns large sections of the South during the Civil War. Yes. He's referring to William Tecumseh's sermon. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy. We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, wake up, America. Brett, that language doesn't sound, even as it invokes the word, nonviolent. So what do you think that he meant by those words in that draft?

Well, I've come to figure out what he meant. Now, understand, as I was saying earlier, by the time he renders his speech, right, he has become steeped in the nonviolent impulse, but his frame, he was portraying it as a forceful measure that could be as powerful and changing as was the sweep of Sherman through South Carolina and Georgia. What you have here is John is working at a very high concept here, right? He's working at a high concept. He's saying, you know, we can be, he was essentially arguing that nonviolent protests could be transformative, as transformative and as disruptive as war as carried out by the most feared general in the Union Army. That is itself a very powerful metaphor. is itself a very powerful metaphor. And it's a testament to his belief, you know, in what his approach could do.

And he was calling upon hundreds of thousands of people to come out into the street and make that a reality, you know. But that's a high concept. And on evening news, you can imagine you'd end up with a snippet of a scorched earth Sherman burning Atlanta again. Right. It might get lost in translation. It might actually undermine the very thing he's trying to promote. Exactly. So basically, you know, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, those guys prevailed on him to make some changes in it. They were talking about, let's not do anything to just not give them a sound bite that's going to give us trouble.

I can hear them saying it. I don't have the tape, but I can hear them saying to John, let's not give them a sound bite that's going to give us trouble. You can say it's a revolution. You can call people in the street. You can even call the black masses if you want to, even though that sounds like

communism, right? You could say those things, but let's leave off Sherman for next time, right? So Sherman goes out. We march today for jobs and freedom.

But we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. He talks about marching. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South. We will march through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham.

But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today. By the forces of our demand, our determination, and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say, wake up, America, wake up, for we cannot stop and we will not and cannot be patient. I see, which is pretty much the same, but Sherman is missing. So in terms of thinking about this speech that John Lewis drafted versus the one he delivered on that historic day, you're saying it's not that the earlier version of the speech

shows John Lewis questioning the nonviolent approach. It's that he believed in the nonviolent approach, but that the language he contemplated using, his belief that the power of that approach could be as powerful as burning, that was determined to be potentially counterproductive to the nonviolent approach he believed in. Exactly. But he talks about going back to his hotel room after that first conversation and just being livid because, of course, it's a it's a 23 year old man speech and a 23 year old man. in an inch of his life while fighting for dignity for Black people, I'm sure he felt entitled to say any damn thing he wanted to because he had the credibility of the streets behind him and the people in the South began to know who he was. And they were going to really know who he was come two years later

at the Voting Rights march at Selma. We'll be right back. Brent, tell me about that. I mean, let's talk about what happens after the March on Washington, after John Lewis's rhetorical wings are ever so slightly clipped, but he does deliver the essential message. How do we see this concept of the power of nonviolence actually play out over the next couple of years? The next big data point becomes the voting rights struggle in Selma, Alabama. Now, it's important, I think, to dilate for just a second for the modern listener. The modern listener needs to understand that in voting arrangements in the South before the Voting Rights Act, registrars, local registrars, had complete authority to do whatever they wanted with people who came in to register to vote. They could give you a test and then say you failed it so you can't register. They did that all day long, all day, every day to black people.

it so you can't register. They did that all day long, all day, every day to black people. In Virginia, a woman, a college educated woman, black woman, who I believe was a teacher, went in to register at one point and filled the application. And the registrar handed her a literacy test. You know what it consisted of? A blank sheet of paper. He asked her, what does this say? And she looked at it and handed it back to him and said, nothing. He said, you're wrong. You fail. You can't register.

Elsewhere in the South, they might ask you if you came in to register to vote, how many bubbles are there in a bar of soap? are there in a bar of soap. Elsewhere, a famous example in the film Selma, where a woman had come in to register one year. And they told her, asked her, how many judges are there in the state of Alabama? And she didn't know. They said, well, you failed. And she came back the second year. And she said, how many county judges are there in Alabama? And I think it was 67. And she said, 67. And he said, now, before you register, you have to name them. So this was what life was like for black people seeking to vote

in the South. Now, John Lewis's organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, had already set up a voting rights project in Selma and had been working on that. But it came

to fruition in 1965 where people had been fed up. And so they staged a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest in favor of voting rights for black people. And then that fateful day on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were walking. State troopers came out and said, this is unlawful. To be detrimental to your safety, to continue this march, and I'm saying that this is an unlawful assembly, you have to disperse, you are ordered to disperse, go home, or go to your church. This march will not continue. You cannot march.

Troopers here, advance toward the group. You cannot march. And then John said to the sheriff, he said, can I have a word? Because, you know, he's in the front with his little off-white trench coat on. And now there's a thing about this trench coat, right? It's very light. So you can see him standing out from everyone else. And the other thing about it is once blood gets on it, you can really see it. So I'm sure that that was premeditated.

So he comes out front and he says, can I have a word? No, you can't have a word. And the troopers begin to advance. And they beat holy hell out of those people. They send 58 people to the hospital. John Lewis suffers a fractured skull and by the time the film is flown back to New York to be shown on the air and it's really one of those films where you see these people running,

you see tear gas and these billy clubs just going up and down, just beating the shit out of people. And because John was in front, you could see him holding his head where he'd been hit and it was on the ground. Can we have somebody take somebody to a doctor? That, that, in my opinion, I'm not the historian here, but in my opinion, that was the ultimate triumph of the nonviolent approach and the suffering approach that he was taking. Why triumphant? Well, it was triumphant because even people who had tried to

look away from what was happening in the South were forced to see the long arm of the law persecuting people publicly, not just persecuting, trying to kill them publicly. And also, the Voting Rights Act was pending at that time. And after this happened, Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of both houses of Congress, I believe, and said, It was more than a hundred years ago that Abraham Lincoln, the great president of another party, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

But emancipation is a proclamation and not a fact. A century has passed, more than 100 years, since equality was promised we cannot delay any longer a century has passed since the day of promise and the promise is unkept

the time of justice has now come we shall overcome The time of justice has now come. We shall overcome. So the Voting Rights Act was signed later that summer, in August. It didn't take long. So when people come in to register to vote, you can no longer ask them how many bubbles are in a bar of soap

or to name every judge in the state. This is a big leap in our time. So quite literally, there's a straight line between the scene of what happened on that bridge and something John Lewis knew would be so powerful, the concept of nonviolent suffering and the legislative remedy back in Washington that resulted because the world had seen this happen. Right. Yeah, I think so. But also, you know, you begin to see, you know, the sort of apex of this message really is 65, 66. And at some point, then John is replaced in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee presidency by Stokely Carmichael.

A fiery orator and one of the primary enunciators of the Black Power Movement that was more consistent with the emerging radicalism of the time. And that was the movement that you felt a part of. Yes. That's where we came into the story, you know? Brent, on some level, you and your cohort must have thought that this approach, the John Lewis approach, had limitations, given that by the time you were a teenager or maybe

even entering your early 20s, there was this new philosophy taking hold of a more elbows out, less restrained approach. So how do you think about that? less restrained approach. So how do you think about that? Well, you know, it's interesting, and I do think about it. What had happened really is every generation, until it educates itself, thinks its experience is unique. So we thought we were unique, you know, my cousins and I, and we had our big meetings and we had our press conferences and we had a different rhetorical stance. But in the end, the tools were exactly the same. The tools were the sit-in of the administration building. Tools were the sit-in of the administration building.

The tool was the sit-in in the street that ran through campus. The tool was the building takeover. You know, these were the same tools, man. I mean, I had bigger hair, right? Right? And I'll send you a picture of it. I have some belief. Please do.

I had good hair. But if you look you look back on the tools were the same you know and it was a it was a foundation that had already been built even if you didn't see it that way at the time and even if you didn't know it you know i'm saying even if you didn't know i keep going back to this point of earlier in the story when they were doing the freedom rides in 1961 they had a big chinese earlier in the story when they were doing the Freedom Rides in 1961. They had a big Chinese dinner in Washington. The people were going off on these Freedom Rides. And a lot of people wrote their wills because they thought that they'd be killed. There's a chance they'd be killed and never come back.

And they refer to the meal at the Chinese restaurant as the Last Supper. And they refer to the meal at the Chinese restaurant as the Last Supper. So these people were willing to put their lives on the line, were willing to accept the possibility that they would be killed in the pursuit of justice and that their dead bodies laying out in public would be part of a sacrifice that would advance the cause of justice. That's profound, you know? Mm-hmm. So with all that in mind, Brad, how are you thinking about John Lewis's legacy at this moment, as we talk in the middle of yet another critical moment

in this movement, and when the work is still understood to be very unfinished. You know, John Lewis, in the waning days of his life, was heartened and overjoyed to see the global protests that unfolded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. He talked about it as part of the extension of his work. And one of the things he said, essentially, I paraphrase him, he said, the thing's out of the box now. He said, there's no going back from this.

And what about the principles of his life? How are you thinking about those in this moment? Well, I think that as you see, his point of view was borne out. Don't touch me! Don't touch me! The other day, the New York Times had a story in which it had 64 examples, video examples of police brutalizing peaceful demonstrators. Mm-hmm. I saw it. Right? Now, what is that?

What that is, is what John was talking about. He was talking about this kind of injustice perpetrated on people who did not deserve it, did not warrant that kind of treatment. And also we've been seeing in this unfolding of the Floyd protests, and it's a repeated theme in the news stories, white suburbanites, you know middle class white people who supported the police unquestioningly right they have changed their minds hmm the real persuasive

thing is seeing people walking around the streets with signs unarmed not doing anything untoward, and being brutalized. That turns out to be the most persuasive thing for the society and for the people to whom it is happening. Don't resist!

Don't resist! Don't resist, bro! I'm not! Don't resist, bro! In other words, we are again seeing this idea of the beloved community playing out. The Gandhian philosophy, this biblical approach that you described. It's working. It's painfully working again.

Yes, it's painful. Lord knows it is. It's painful. it is, just painting. But the abuse of the people in public, people's constitutional rights, you know, through violence by police organizations has broad rippling consequences. It's having broad rippling consequences. It's beyond the people who you beat up who now don't have confidence in the police. And John saw all that. Brent, is there anything from Lewis's memoir that you haven't already shared that you want to leave us with? Well, I don't know if it fits,

but perhaps we should just put that aside and read from one of John Lewis's favorite poems. It's Invictus by William Ernest Henley. Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody but unbound. Beyond this place of wrath and tears, looms but the horror of the shade, and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters

not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Brent, thank you very much. We really appreciate your time today. Well, good to be with you. Boy, Congressman Lewis joins us now for his first network TV interview since the protest over the death of George Floyd began. Congressman John Lewis, it's so good to see you. I can't tell you, you are such a sight for sore eyes today. It's really good to see you.

What would you tell Congressman young people and people, quite frankly, who were not so young about the best way to seek justice? You know, there's been a lot of controversy, a lot of talk about the looting. And we should stress that most of the protests were very peaceful, but there was some looting, there was some disruption. What would you say to people about the best way to achieve justice?

It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds and thousands of people from all over America and around the world taken to the streets, to the roadways, to stand up, to speak up, to speak out, or to do what I call getting in trouble. getting in trouble. During the 60s, the great majority of us accepted the way of peace, the way of love, the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living. There's something cleansing, something wholesome about being peaceful and orderly. To stand up with a sense of dignity and a sense of pride and never hate. As Dr. King said over and over again, hate is too heavy a burden to bear. The way of love is a much better way. And that's what we did.

We were arrested. Yes, I was beaten, left bloody and unconscious, but I never became bitter or hostile, never gave up. I believe that somehow, some way if it becomes necessary to use our bodies to help redeem the soul of a nation then we must do it. Create a society at peace with yourself. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.