John Lewis “stood for everything that is good.”
U.S. flags are being flown at half-staff in memory of Congressman John Lewis, who died Friday of cancer.
Courtesy of the White House
By Jerry Mitchell
Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
Myrlie Evers remembered Congressman John Lewis as a fearless civil rights leader who “stood for everything that is good, everything that is strong and everything that is merciful.”
There was, said the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, “something magical about him. Even Dr. (Martin Luther) King followed him.”
Myrlie Evers remembers Congressman John Lewis
Courtesy of the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute
Lewis died Friday night at the age of 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.
A son of sharecroppers, he grew up on an Alabama farm and dreamed of being a pastor, preaching to the chickens.
He felt inspired when he learned about the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott and decided to attend the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where he embraced the nonviolence philosophy.
Lewis joined the 1960 sit-ins in Nashville and became one of more than 150 young people arrested. Their protests helped end segregationist policies in downtown stores.
Those sit-ins also culminated in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at a conference at Shaw University. Before the conference ended, civil rights activists joined in a new version of “We Shall Overcome,” swaying in time and singing “black and white together,” repeating, “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”
On May 4, 1961, Lewis and a dozen other Freedom Riders left on a Greyhound bus from Washington, D.C. Eight days later, they arrived in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where the integrated group of riders entered the “whites-only” waiting room.
He wound up joining another Freedom Ride, only to be attacked in Montgomery, Alabama. “An angry mob came out of nowhere, hundreds of people, with bricks and balls, chains,” he recalled. “I thought I was going to die.”
After beating on the riders, the mob turned on reporters and then Justice Department official John Seigenthaler, who was beaten unconscious and left in the street after helping two riders. “Then they turned on my colleagues and started beating us and beat us so severely, we were left bloodied and unconscious in the streets of Montgomery,” Lewis recalled.
To quell the violence, Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in 450 federal marshals.
The question arose, “Will the Freedom Rides continue?” and Lewis answered that question by putting himself on the line and traveling with those 26 other Freedom Riders into Mississippi.
When they arrived on May 24, 1961, at a bus station in Jackson, Mississippi, police arrested them and sent them to Mississippi’s worst prison, Parchman.
“We had to walk right in, and you had to take off all of your clothes,” Lewis recalled.
Two hours later, he was still standing there, naked, he said. “it was an attempt to belittle and dehumanize you.”
After spending nearly 40 days in that prison, Lewis was finally released, July 7, 1961.
Two years later, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the March on Washington, delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech, but the words that inspired many civil rights activists that day were spoken by Lewis.
"While we stand here, there are sharecroppers in the Delta of Mississippi who are out in the fields working for less than three dollars a day, twelve hours a day. While we stand here there are students in jail on trumped-up charges,” he said. “The voting section of this bill will not help the thousands of black people who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote, but lack a sixth-grade education. ...
“We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again. And then you holler, ‘Be patient.’ How long can we be patient? We want our freedom, and we want it now.”
Two years later, Lewis led fellow protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where state troopers attacked the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and bullwhips, an event dubbed “Bloody Sunday.”
The event helped propel passage of the Voting Rights Act.
Two decades after that act became law, Lewis was elected to Congress, where he became a voice for the voiceless in Washington.
In 2011, President Obama honored Lewis with the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
For the past two decades, Lewis has spoken to high school students as part of the Sojourn to the Past program.
“John Lewis was a true founding father of our country,” said Sojourn Executive Director Jeff Steinberg. “What he and others did was to help redeem the soul of America.”
Myrlie Evers said despite Lewis’ frustrations with the slowness of the system, “I never heard him complain about being tired and weary,” she said. “He never wavered.”
On Sunday, she glanced at a photograph of her standing with her grandsons next to Lewis and nearly wept.
She believes the congressman will be remembered more after death than he was during his life.
“It’s amazing to me how we can have such marvelous human beings walking in our midst, but we don’t recognize that until they’re gone,” she said. “John Lewis’ spirit is going to live on forever.”
Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization that is exposing wrongdoing, educating and empowering Mississippians, and raising up the next generation of investigative reporters. Sign up for MCIR’s newsletters here.
Email him at Jerry.Mitchell.MCIR@gmail.com and follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
Mitchell’s new book for Simon & Schuster, Race Against Time, details his reporting that helped lead to convictions in nine unpunished murders from the Civil Rights Era. The book is now available in hardback as well as on Kindle and audio versions. Signed and personalized copies are available through MCIR.