The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 42: The Honorable John Lewis, and the Inimitable Paul Simon

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

 In this episode, two living legends—the civil-rights leader John Lewis and the singer-songwriter Paul Simon—reflect on how far they’ve come.     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

conversation with someone when they have that revelation. It seems to make me a sure pretty huge. You're good if you have a source for it. Yeah, the telegraph. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

John Lewis is a 30-year veteran of Congress, and you might think that surviving in Washington that long would be his biggest accomplishment, but it isn't. Lewis is a lion of the civil rights movement. He's a protege of Martin Luther King, one of the original Freedom Riders, and when he was just 23 years old, he helped plan the march on Washington. I'll talk with Lewis about King, about JFK, and surviving all those years in Congress a little later in the hour. But first up, another lion of his field, a songwriter who probably needs no introduction, Paul Simon. When Simon played Bridge Over Troubled Water at the Democratic National Convention just a couple of weeks ago,

it was especially poignant because he had just announced in the pages of the New York Times that he might just retire from music entirely, maybe when his fall tour is over. Simon sat down with Paul Muldoon, the poet, and poetry editor of the magazine at the New Yorker Festival in 2013. Thank you. Listen, the focus today is on the art of songwriting. It seems to me that we are profoundly interested in, engaged by, excited by how things get made, be it the guitar itself, and be it in this case the song. So that's what we're going to focus on today, if we may.

And I'm going to kick off by asking you very directly, you got involved in songwriting when you were a teenager. Yes, I wouldn't even say that I got involved in it. It was just something that I naturally did because I liked the music that I was listening to when I was young. That music was rhythm and blues from the 50s. And kind of what was just before Duwop, it would have probably later on be called Duwop. The thing that was great about it was that most of the songs, from that era were all written to the same chord structures. So I'll give you an example.

So there was a template for almost all of them? Well, yes, you could say that. Will you be mine, my darling dear, love you all the time. I'm just a fool, a fool in love. you. That's Earth Angel. Probably the most famous of the songs from the groups of the 50s. And so my dad was a professional musician. He was a bass player. So I asked him, would he teach me the chords to these songs? He said, yeah, they're all the same chords, you know? And so the first song I wrote was, The girl for me is standing there.

That's the one flowers in her head. I'll always love her. And I know she'll be true. You get the point. I think getting the point is really quite important in all of this. One would be surprised, I think, if one had no sense of how these songs were written to discover that the words tend to come much later down the road. Oh, now?

Yes. Well, the songwriter that I am now is very, very different from the songwriter that I was even in the 70s. And that writing was different from what I wrote in the 60s for Simon and Garfunkel. And before that, when I was doing imitation of teenage stuff, that was another way. Then I just wrote the songs. I didn't, there was no need to separate the music from the words. They all came at the same time. Also, when you're young and your writing, there's really no problem with the words because

you don't know anything. So whatever you say is fine because you don't know anything. You know? Later on, you say, oh, I can't say that. That isn't exactly true. So things become more sophisticated as our brains become more sophisticated and attuned to irony and to the yin and yang of everything. And if your professional life is as a songwriter,

you begin to incorporate these concepts into your, thinking and when I started to do that I found that simply playing the guitar and improvising over it like look this is the way most songs begin when people begin playing okay they go I'm just here and I don't know what to say now so I'll talk about the girl who I love who doesn't exist. That sounds pretty good to me. Well, that's why I wrote a lot of hits in the beginning.

Now I can't write one for, you know, for anything. But nowadays, do you tend to begin less often with the guitar, or do most of them still begin with the guitar? Now I write both ways. But the big change came with Graceland. Even before I went to South Africa and even before I fell in love with South African music, I really felt like I don't want to go into the studio and have a song where the track isn't equal to the song. So one of the famous songs on Graceland is called The Boy in the Bubble.

So that was recorded with an accordion player who came from a little country within South Africa, country called the Sutu. And he played a certain kind of music, a suitu music, and that was the boy in the bubble. In that session, we just let the tape roll, really. So one of the tracks that existed there, that he played on, I said, you know what? I don't really want the accordion on it.

The only thing I really like on this track are the drums. So let's just keep the drums. So we have that track. I can show you. So this is a track that was recorded on the same day I recorded Boy in the Bubble, the day before I recorded Grace Land, where I said, all I want are the drums. So here's the accordion track. Now the next day, a group of musicians come in and I say to the guitarist, to the gift of guitarist, I say, I have a drum track. that I like, what would you play to this drum track?

So he hears the drum track and he says, it sounds like American country music to me, which is probably why I liked it. So you know what? Please play what we just heard and then go directly into the Graceland track. It's pretty good. This is him thinking this is country music.

And me thinking it sounds like a mix between South Africa and rock and roll, like Soweto Hillbilly, Rockabilly. And then I wrote that line, da, he's playing this rhythm. The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar. Following the river down the highway through the cradle of the Civil War. Graceland, Raceland, into Memphis, Tennessee on Graceland. So here's what happened. This is, I think, the most extraordinary.

moment in the whole making of that album. The guitarist, name is Ray Piri. And he's playing this stuff, Key of E. And then he does something that's really quite amazing in the context of South Africa. You have to know South African music is three chords in a major key.

They'd never play a minor chord. I shouldn't say never because I'm sure there's something. But most South African music is that. So he plays that, then he goes. And I say, whoa, Ray, why did you play that chord? It's the first time I hear anybody play a minor chord, a relative minor. He's playing in the key of E.

He's playing a C sharp minor. So he says, because that's the chord that you play, I heard you play those chords. Well, of course, I learned that sequence of course. chords from Earth Angel. So here's Ray, who's playing what he thinks is American country and adding a chord structure that he knows from my music to a beat that came from an accordion track

that had nothing to do with this. And then when he gets to the chorus, he goes into a kind of African blues. So, I mean, what we have here really is world music. It's really people doing what they heard and vaguely remember and trying to imitate what it was. So here's this track. The track exists and I don't know what its song is about. And I'm singing, going to Graceland, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee, I'm going to Graceland.

And I'm thinking, well, of course, I'm not going to sing that because it's not about Graceland or Elvis Presley or anything. So I'm going to change that and get rid of that. And I can do that because I just have a track so I can change the words any time I want. But I can't. I keep singing that and keep singing that. So finally, I go. I say I'm going to Graceland. I'm going to go there and see what this is all about, you know, because I'd never been there.

And as I'm driving up north on Highway 61, I mean the opening line. lines are literally in front of me. I'm driving through the Mississippi Delta and it just comes, it's just a description. The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar. Not everyone would think perhaps of the national guitar. Well, you know, there are, I'm sure that you understand this, Paul, that there are aspects of the creative process that you really don't understand.

And that's, you know, part of the great joy of it is because it's a You don't know why that jumped into your head. But it's not important. The thing about it is is you say, ah, yeah, I could use that. That's a good thing. It jumps into your head. One of the things that fascinates me, as I've read some of your interviews over the years, is that is your insistence that you are there at the service of the song, off the words,

and that that image perhaps of the national guitar, which is most of us I think will know, is the steel guitar. So it's absolutely, what I'm getting at is it's a brilliant description of the landscape at an angle with the sun reflected off the water, which is why I say not all of us would come up with that. And it justifies that I'm going to Graceland. I'm going to Graceland. That's where I'm going.

Now the question is, so what's the song about? Okay, you've got a good reason to go to Grace Land. And the reason is the track sounds like it was cut at Sun Studios in Memphis. To me, it sounds like it's a rockabilly track. Then the rest of it was just a description of being there. Poor boys and pilgrims with families and we were all going to... Everybody got on the bus and, you know, went to... went in.

I didn't tell anybody that I was coming. I just bought a ticket and got online and went with everybody else. walk through Grace Land. I don't suppose most people who walk through Graceland, though, have had the opportunity to hear Elvis Presley sing one of their songs, as you did with... Yeah, not most people, no. As you did with Elvis singing Bridge Over Troubled Water? Yeah, I did.

That was a kind of... It was a privilege because Elvis Presley was... I was thinking not too long ago, I've had four heroes in my life, you know, where I just was fascinated by them. And nobody else, just four. The first one was Mickey Mantle. I was only interested in baseball when I was a kid. The second was Elvis Presley, which now he has rock and roll.

and girls, and baseball, rock and roll, and girl. And that's pretty much never changed since then. I haven't really grown much past that point. And the third one was JFK, and the fourth one was Lenny Bruce. And after that, I never, you know, I mean, there were people who I was impressed with and whose talent I, you know, thought was enormous. But I wasn't in awe of anyone. They weren't heroes to me.

Bo Diddley must have been getting up there. Yeah, Bo Diddley was great, but I wouldn't have said, I just want to know everything there is to know all about. Yeah, I loved Bo Diddley. And you know what's interesting about Bo Didley? The beat is African. It doesn't have a backbeat. It's...

It's not on two and four and four, it's four, four. And so me liking that, I'm not later on later on I like African music, because that's the same. I just like that. You know what I mean? That's who knows why, although I start to think, you know, now, now. now, oh, why is it that that's the case? Or even more important, how can I get the sounds

that I love into the records that I'm making? Because if I get the rhythm right, and you ask me before, do is there's a start with, how does this start? Well, a lot of times I'll start with a rhythmic premise, which is exactly what Graceland was, just a drum. And other times, if I'm writing a ballad, I'll start with a guitar premise, and there won't be any other things.

So the rhythmic premise is fun because you're being, it's all counterpunching. I'm responding to stimuli. I hear a groove and I say, I like that groove. Great, let's do that groove. Let me think what I'd play against that. I play this, I'll play that. It's nice to be an editor. You love to be an editor, right?

And a band leader in that respect, I think. Well, that's just an editor. Absolutely. Now, let me turn it to you. Here comes a poem. I say, Paul, where did that come from? What happened? Did you think about that for a long time?

Was it something that you saw when you cross the street? Is it a childhood memory? So what? Where does it come from? Well, I think it varies a little bit from poem to poem, and I'm sure there'll be another opportunity for me to discuss it. What? You're going to duck the question? Unbelievable.

Let's go back to a song that just is so... Actually, its title is something that is one that was used of another song. That's a song of yours that I adore among so many, Darling Lorraine. Well, Darling Lorraine was... First of all, there was a song called Darling Lorraine. It wasn't a big hit. I liked it. It was a doo-wop song.

Same chords, same stuff. That's what, it was two guys and one person sang the background, all the background. Like that's all there was. It wasn't a group. It wasn't the usual thing. And he just kept saying, la. And then I don't even know what they were singing over the title. And the song is called Darling L'Rour.

You know, I'm always interested in or I really need a first line. I need to begin. It's really hard to begin. So I start off with, again, I really don't know what I'm doing, this whole first verse. I really don't know what I'm doing. The first time I saw her, I couldn't be sure. But the sin of impatience is a line from one of my notes. the sin of impatience.

I say, oh, that fits. But the sin of impatience said, she's just what you're looking for. Okay. So I walk right up to her. Terrible writing, really. And with the part of me that talks, it's nice.

I introduced myself as Frank, which is kind of funny because I know the guy's going to be a liar. You know, so we'll call him Frank. Introduce myself as Frank from New York, New York, which is already a lie, because anybody from New York never says they're from New York, New York. Just say, you're from New York.

The everybody knows is it's not New York, comma, New York. You know, like Buffalo, New York. Okay, I have a character. And I have, you know, kind of a personality trait. I don't know what. She's so hot. She's so cool. Basic songwriting, nothing.

I'm not. I'm just a food. in love, most trite lie in a song that you can write in the song, just a fool in love with Darling Lorraine. Good. Here's my characters, Frank and Lorraine. Now I'm stuck with, so where am I going to go? What's this going to be about?

So I start the second verse. All my life I've been a wanderer. I think, yeah, that is real . Right there. Then comes the moment that like, make a moment that like, make a wanderer. the song for me, cracks it open. I say, all my life I've been a wanderer. Not really.

I mostly live near my parents' home. Anyway, Lorraine and I got married. Boom, we're like way ahead in the story. And the usual marriage stuff. Not even bothering with anything. It's just moving. And then one day she says to me, Frank, I've had enough. Yeah.

Romance is a heartbreaker, and I'm not meant to be a homemaker and I'm tired of being darling Lorraine. Devastating. Conflict. Conflict. Then the song changes its pattern, rhythmic pattern, and the words are, what? You don't love me anymore?

What? You're walking out the door? What? You don't like the way I chew? Very, very male line. What? You don't like the way I chew? Hey, let me.

me tell you. You're not the woman that I wed. Here's it, Frank. Again, the level of insight that you can see Frank has. You're not the woman that I wed. You say you're depressed, but you're not. You just like to stay in bed. I don't need you, darling Lorraine. Okay, good. A good fight. He doesn't know anything, Frank. Lorraine, Lorraine, I long for your love. Good. Fight, breaks it up. Guy's really in love. He hasn't a clue. But he's really in love. Okay, good. Now the song changes its chord pattern and its key and everything.

And the way I recorded it, it sounded very, very sugary sweet, too sweet for me. So I said, well, I can either take this thing and, like, toughen it up, or else just go into a sweet story. So I say, well, okay, a sweet story. So what would that be? okay, on Christmas morning, Frank awakes to find Lorraine has made a stack of pancakes. They watch the television, husband and wife, all afternoon. It's a wonderful life. But we don't even need the next argument because he's back with what?

You don't love me anymore? What? You're walking out the door? What? You don't like the way I chew? Hey, let me tell you. You're not the woman that I wed. Give me my robe.

I'm going back to bed. I'm sick to death of you, Lorraine. And as soon as I wrote that line, I said, I had no idea. Lorraine is going to die. I'm sick to death of you, Lorraine. Never should have said that. Lorraine, Lorraine, her hands like wood.

The doctor was smiling, but the news wasn't good. Darling, Lorraine. please don't leave me yet. I know you're in pain. Pain you can't forget. Your breathing is like an echo of our love. Maybe I'll go down to the corner store and buy something sweet. Here's an extra blanket, honey, to wrap around your feet.

All the leaves were washed with April rain, and the moon in the meadow took darling the rain. So, a story, you know. Who knew that that was going there? I didn't know it was going there. For the pleasure of writing a song, that one had a lot of pleasure because I didn't know. It had jokes in it. It had my favorite kind of jokes about somebody who's stupid and doesn't know it, you

know, Frank. And then this thing of getting just whacked by it. you know, by mortality. Did you find yourself, as you came to that point, I mean, did you find yourself emotionally overwhelmed in the way that I think most people

who hear that song? Even, if you don't mind my saying so, without the music, just to hear you speak it, to hear it spoken, I think it's a tremendously move. Yeah, he did. I started to cry. It was as I said, I'm sick to death of you. You know, there's a great lot

and Robert Frost, among many great lines, he writes no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. And anyway, I think in a strange way, that's an indicator of the power of the words themselves without the music. Brilliant, though, it is with the music. I love that story as I remember it. I'm sure I misremember of your being in Peru and meeting a Peruvian singer, I think, playing for... I was in the Amazon. It was up the Amazon, El Condor Pasa.

Right. She was playing this, her, you know, sitting with her guitar. And I said, I know a Peruvian song. And I didn't have a guitar, and I sang, and she knew it and she played it. And she said, I know an American song. I said, okay, let's hear it. And she played the sound of silence.

You know, I think, if you don't mind my saying, that says it all about Paul Simon. Paul Simon talking with Paul Muldoon, the poetry editor of The New Yorker in 2013. Simon's album Stranger to Stranger came out just this summer. let a fairly decent life made a fairly decent living had a fairly decent wife

she killed them a sushi knife now they're shopping for a fairly decent after life bits or mixed reviews life is a lottery a lot of people lose and the winners the grinners

with money colored eyes eat all the nuggets and they order extra fries the world is called extra fries You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. I'm David Remnick, and welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Next week we're going to hear something kind of special,

a memoir by the late Arthur Miller, the great playwright, called Before Air Conditioning. It's about the hazy summer days and nights in the 1920s when city people slept out on their fire escapes, and they sweated in factories without even the benefit of a fan. It's read for us by the actor F. Murray Abraham, and it'll make you pretty thankful for modern technology. We'll also hear from the novelist Janice, Y. K. Lee, author of the piano teacher, about her own childhood in the metropolis of Hong Kong.

A lot of times people think of the skyline of Hong Kong, but you can have a very idyllic childhood there, and it's very quiet. For a time we lived above sort of a beach that was backed by a farm. And so I would just go downstairs in my apartment, and we go through the farm and go to the beach. That's next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Last fall, I got to sit down with Congressman John Lewis

for a conversation at the New Yorker Festival. John Lewis is a hero. He's the last living member of what's been called the Big Six, the leaders of the major civil rights organizations that planned the march on Washington. Lewis was just a kid in the room at that time. He was way younger than Roy Wilkins or A. Philip Randolph and even Martin Luther King, Jr.

In that fight for civil rights, Lewis was on the front lines, literally. He survived brutal attacks during the freedom rights and in Selma during the March for Voting Rights. So when John Lewis talks about his embrace of nonviolence as a philosophy, as a way of life, he knows better than anyone what that entails, and he's got the scars to show for it. I'd like to begin because I think there may be some people in this room who have never been to Pike, County, Alabama, by asking you to describe your beginnings, just to root us in where you started out, what it was like, your parents.

Just describe it for us. I grew up in a very large family, six brothers and three sisters, wonderful mother and wonderful father, the same community, the same on the same land that my mother was born on, that my grandfather and my great-grandfather on my mother's side was born home. It was dirt poor.

We didn't have running water. We didn't have power. We picked a lot of cotton, pooled corn, gather peanuts. As a little boy growing up, Growing up, it was my responsibility on the farm to care for the chickens. And I fell in love with raising chickens. I became very good at raising chickens.

As a little child, we would gather all of our chickens together in the chicken yard. And my brothers and sisters and cousin were lying the outside of the chicken yard. But along with the chickens, they would help make up the audience, the congregation. I wanted to be a minister. So from time to time, I would talk to the chicken.

I would preach them. And when I look back on it... Your parents didn't worry about that at all. No, they really did. They thought I was grew up to be a minister, and they thought I was learning by preaching to the chicken, practice the sermon. So these chickens never quite said amen.

But they would buy their heads, they would shake their heads. And when I look back on it, I'm convinced today that some of those chickens that I preached to them, than the 40s and the 50s, tended to listen to me much better than some of my colleagues listened to me today in the Congress. And as a matter of fact, some of those chicken were just a little more productive.

At least they produce eggs. I think, to be very frank and candid with you, David, my first nonviolent protestor, protesting against my mother and father when they wanted to have one of the chickens for dinner. I didn't like it. And so I would boycott the meal. But I didn't like segregation.

I didn't like seeing the signs that said white, waiting, colored women, colored women, colored women. And I've asked my mother, ask my father, my grandparents, and great-grandparents, they said, that's the way it is. Don't get in the way.

Don't get in trouble. But in 1955, when I was 15, years old, I heard what happened to Emmettiel. And later during the same year, I think Emmettier was murdered on August 28, 1965. And then Rosa Parks took a seat on December 1st, 1955. And the action of Rosa Parks inspired me. So in 1956, I was 16 years old. with some of my brothers and sisters and cousins,

we went down to the puppet library in the little town of Troy, Alabama, trying to get library cards, trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library is for whites only and not for colors. I never went back to the Pat County Public Library, not the same building,

until July 5th, 1998, for a book signing of my book, Walking with the Wind. And hundreds of blacks and white citizens showed up. The end of the book signing, they gave me a library card. Now, explain particularly for people who are younger here, why did the Till case, 1995, have such an electrifying effect on black America and the United States in general,

from you to Muhammad Ali to any number of people that became important figures in the civil rights movement? Well, Emmett Till, this year, young African-American boy 15 years old. He was Lynch, and it was a trial. They were not convicted. And his mother came down from Chicago, and she said, I want to cast it to be open

so the world can see what they did to my child. And it had an unbelievable impact. Those pictures in particular. Those photographs. In the Black Press and in Life magazine. Yeah. People all over America. America started protesting about what happened to this 15-year-old child.

And yet, you were a very young person at that time. I was 15. And eventually, not that long after you go to FISC and you become involved in actions of civil disobedience and passive resistance. By the fall of 1959, we started studying the philosophy and a discipline of nonviolence. We studied the great religions of the world. We had a wonderful teacher, a young man by the name of Jim. Lawson, who was a pacifist, who get us together every Tuesday night at 6.30 p.m., but we had role playing. We had social drama.

What would you do in the role playing sessions? Like people spitting on you, beating you, throwing you in jail, knocking you down. And nothing while you're doing this, and even when the events themselves comes along, strikes as it does many people today as absurd, too much, too much to bear. Many of us as young people during those days accepted the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence as a way of life. We started what Martin Luther King Jr. was all about in Montgomery. So we were ready.

We were prepared. No, it's, if we wanted to redeem. the soul of America, and we wanted to what we call, create the beloved community. We had to use the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. We accepted the idea that the philosophy of nonviolence is one of those immutable principles

that you couldn't deviate from. No matter what. No matter what. You're beaten? Yes. You're arrested. You're thrown in jail. jail, but you will not hate. You will not become bitter or hostile. You would keep the faith.

The first time I got arrested, I should tell you, I felt free. I felt liberated. Why is that? I felt like I crossed over because we have been told over and over again. Don't get in trouble. Don't get in their way. It's not a nice thing to go to jail. So during the 60s, I was the rest of 40 times for sitting in, or standing in, a marching for the right to vote. And since I've been in Congress, five more time. And I'll probably get arrested again for some. Congressman John Lewis.

We'll continue our conversation in a minute talking about Malcolm X and how to survive life in the United States Congress. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick, and welcome back. Back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Last fall, I sat down with Georgia Congressman John Lewis, and he talked about his early years growing up on a farm as the son of sharecroppers,

getting involved in the fight against segregation in the South, and being taken under the wing of Martin Luther King Jr. Let's talk about Selma for a moment. This is 50 years ago. When you think of your own self at that age, you were very, very young. You're at the front of the line. What got you there? What put you there?

What qualities in you as such a young person? Had you at the front of the line at this event that must have seemed momentous even then not knowing how it would play out down the line? You know, when I spoke at the march on Washington, on August 28, 1963, when I was working on the speech with some of the staffers,

the student nonviolent coordinating committee, Snick, have been reading a newspaper, and I saw a group of black women in Southern Africa carrying signs and one man, one vote. So in my March on Washington speech, I said something like, one man, one vote is the African cry. It is ours, too, it must be ours.

I didn't like the fact that my own mother, my own father, my own teachers, could not participate in the democratic process, that people were told they could not read the right will enough. And I knew we had to do something about it. So when I became chair of the student Unviolent Coordination Committee, we started working all across the south. Places like Selma, places in Mississippi,

there were one county between Selma and Montgomery. Lounge County was more than 80% African-American. There was not a single registered African-American voter in the county. We knew we had to do something. We had to find a way to dramatize the issue, to make it real. We had to march on Washington. The Civil Rights Act was passed

and signed into law by President Johnson in July in 1964, but people still couldn't register to vote in many parts of the South. Three young men, two from New York City, Andy Goodman, Mickey Scherner, a young African-American from Mississippi, James Shoney,

who went out on a Sunday night, June 21, 1964, to investigate the burning of an African American church to be used for voter registration workshops. These three young men were stopped by the sheriff, arrested, placed in jail, then taken out of jail, turn over to the clan, for they were beaten, shot, and killed. We couldn't allow their death to be in vain. We had to insist that the Congress passed the voting rights. There seemed to be in you as a young man, a tension between your adherence to the principles of nonviolence and your loyalty to Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And then a more radicalizing rhetoric and the movement towards SNCC. And as you know, better than anybody else in this world, there was both an alliance between and a pronounced

tension between SCLC and SNCC, and those tensions would grow in the movement and reach their even wider Gulf with the rise of Malcolm X, Black Power, and the Panthers. What conflict, what inner conflicts were you facing as an individual and as a civil rights leader and as a young man in the movement? Well, these questions. Well, I love and am I, Dr. King. If he hadn't been from Arthur Cain, Jr., I don't know what would that happen to me. He inspired me.

He set me on a path. In 1962, before I became the chair of the student nonviolent coordinating committee, he invited me to become a member of his board of director as sort of the liaison between the young people and the adults in the movement. He was almost like a big brother. And I was not going to sit. separate my affection and love for Dr. King. He was my leader, and I could be strong, and I could sign militant and sign Radica,

but I believe in the way of peace, the way of love. I believe that we got to have programs, not just a lot of rhetoric, but we have to engage in the one, two, threes, and ABCs of organizing people and organizing the movement. and leading a group of people. Were you made uncomfortable by or worried about things pulling you more to the left,

say Stokely Carmich, who was also in SNCC and a comrade of yours? Describe those tensions and how you look back at them. Well, I never got caught up in the rhetoric of Black Power because SNCC as an organization, we believed in doing something in a programmatic way not just talking to talk, but walking to walk. I've never heard you talk much about Malcolm X and your evaluation of his legacy, both how you felt about him in real time

and how you now look back at him and his role in the movement. Well, I first met Malcolm on the eve of the march on Washington the night of August 27, 1963, and we had a brief discussion. How did he feel about the march on Washington? He was not that supportive of the march. And he had some things to say about the march.

What did he say? Well, he said in the fact that we allowed President Kennedy to turn the march into a social picnic or something like that. The JFK was somehow using you to take the onus off of him. Take some of the steam. As you well know, in the beginning, President Kennedy was not that supported of the morning. Not at all.

When we met with him in June in 1963, he said, if you bring all these people to Washington, when there be violence and chaos and disorder, we would never get a civil rights wheel through the Congress. And after the march took place, it was so successful that day, President Kennedy invited us all back down to the White House. He stood in the door to the Oval Office, greeting us. He was beaming like a pride father. He kept saying, you did a good job, you did a good job. And when he got to Dr. King, he said, you did a good job. good job and you had a dream.

That was my last time sitting there. Did you find that purely joyful or a little patronizing or both from Kennedy's point of view? No, I thought he was being encouraging and that he was so pleased that everything had gone so well that in his own way. You know, he was the first president in the history of the country. When he delivered that speech on June 11, 1963. So the issue of race, the issue of civil rights is a moral issue.

But at the same time, he has J. Edgar Hoover spying on Martin Luther King. So he's a double... Well, I'm not going to try to defend a speaker for President Kennedy, but to be very frank and candid, I think a lot of presidents were afraid of Jay Gah Hoover. This man did so much damage. Have you ever looked at your FBI report? Oh, yes. I've seen it. Yeah.

What are the highlights? Well, I can't, I just cannot tell you. You know, when you get the report, it's a lot of just mark out, it's black and out. Yeah. Were you grateful for that? Not really. I think the truth, everything should come out. I didn't do anything that was, I thought was illegal or in Moire or anything like that.

I think this man was obsessed with destroying a movement to liberate all of the American people. Hoover. Hoover, yes. And if I had told you in 1965 that we'd be where we are now, both with a black president, but also with Ferguson and Staten Island and everything we know about the dynamics of this country and its inequalities and the nature of institutional racism, whether it's in our schools or in our voting laws, how would you have reacted? Are you so immensely hopeful?

Well, to lose hope is to give up. You have to be optimistic. You have to believe somehow in some way we're going to work it out. I get that, but look at the institution you work in. I know, but in spite of it all, we're human. We make blunders. We make mistakes. It's in keeping with the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence that you have to press on.

I have to say, and I mean this with great respect, I think. Viewed from outside and even peeking in once in a while as a reporter, the House of Representatives represents one of those French caricatures of the French Assembly and everybody looks kind of strange and weird and monstrous. And it is a... Well, not in front of you. I'm not going to say... No, that's okay. A show.

Oh. Nothing gets done. Leaderships don't mean much anymore. You go to work there every day. Do you come home at night and drink yourself to sleep? What's it like? Who do you talk to? Well, it's another world.

It's another world. I try to be hopeful and optimistic. But every now and then, I, too, have an executive session. Quite a few these days. Saying why. I've seen, you know, I've been in Congress now for almost 30 years. And I've seen better days. What's happening?

Why is there this talent level, this sense of resentment and anger and fury and inexplicable? We're going to have another school shooting or another mass shooting sure shooting in three weeks or in two months. but it will happen. And nothing. I think you have a group of people who have been elected. And I don't know why they ran for office in the first place.

That they don't like government. And some of them don't like people. It's a great combination. Really. I think that people who go to bed mean, a dream mean, they get up mean and be mean for the rest of the day. today go back to bed and just mean some more, saying, who can I hurt today or tomorrow?

They don't believe in government. One of the common t-shirts that I've seen among adherence to an activist for Black Lives Matter is this isn't your granddaddy civil rights movement. How would you, you've obviously met with people, you've seen what's happened, you've seen the use of social media, as an organizing principle. Where is Black Lives Matter at this point?

What do you admire about it? Maybe what concerns you about it? And what role does it play? Just last evening, I was in the airport, and a young man came up and he said, Congressman Lewis, I'm part of Black Lives Matter. So I admire you. I love you.

So you're my hero. You and your friends and the student nonviolent coordinating committee in SNCC made it possible for us to exist. And I said, I wish you well, continue your work. Do you feel a part of it? I feel like some of these young people could be my children, my grandchildren, or my grandchildren, a great-grandchildren, and maybe they're picking up where we left off, but they're part of an extension of that movement.

Let's look at where they and all of us have to pick up where you have brought us. Voting rights is something that it particularly concerns you. Lay out for us where we are with voting rights, what the motivations of the players are, and what the possibilities are. Well, the voting rights site that was signed into law on August 6, 1965, changed American forever. When I wondered if the King Jr. came back from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, he had a meeting

with President Johnson. And he said to the President in so many words, Mr. President, we need a voting right side. And Linda Johnson said, if you want it, make you do it. He said, we don't have a vote in the Congress to get a voting rights act pass. I just signed a civil rank site. But if you want it, make me do it. So Martin Luther King, Jr., join us in Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had been working since 1962.

And the drummer of Selma, the drummer of Mississippi and other parts of the South, created the climate, created the environment to get the act passed and sign into law on August 6, 1965, 50 years ago. Since then, because of the decision of the United States, United States Supreme Court. That decision put a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

And many states, not just southern states, but states in the northeast. Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, it's a good example, in the Midwest, and all across our country. Why is this happening? We've made so much progress. We made progress. But things are changing. People are afraid of the future.

America is changing. Be specific. What are they afraid? Of a brown or America? Whether they're afraid of the makeup of America's changing. Just look around. And I don't want to be that partisan about it, but just look around. When Texas become a democratic stronghold,

when the Latino population become citizens, and we set people on the path to citizenship, when we have comprehensive immigration reform, People get registered, start voting. America will be a different America. And people shouldn't be afraid. Should embrace the future. As the Pope said, we all are immigrants.

Congressman, thank you and thank you all for coming. Congressman John Lewis, I talked with him last October at the New Yorker Festival. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and that's it for today. Thanks so much for listening. You can find both of the interviews you heard today, and in fact, Everything we've done over the past year, it's almost a year now, at New YorkerRadio.org. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon, Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nicks, Michael Rayfield, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Owen Agnew, Alex Barron, Becky Cooper, and very special thanks this week to David Ohana and Rhonda Sherman. The New York Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.