Under the Baobab: Remembering John Lewis and ‘good trouble’
During his life, John Lewis used to get into trouble. He called it “good trouble to achieve necessary change.” There are two iconic photographs of John Lewis taken at the Edmund-Pettus Bridge leading from Selma, Alabama. The first is from 1965, on Bloody Sunday. Lewis has been knocked to the ground, his hand is raised above his head in a useless attempt to stop the blow coming from a policeman’s club, which is about to crack his skull.
He said later that he thought he would die on that bridge that day.
That moment was seen by millions on television. It was the birth of a phase of the national civil rights movement, the enfranchisement of Alabama’s Black population. Fewer than 1% of the eligible Black voters in the state had been allowed to register. After what became known as Bloody Sunday, Martin Luther King and John asked people to come and support their efforts to hold another march to Montgomery. My mentor and former pastor, Father Clements, went. I couldn’t go. I was in San Francisco organizing a memorial for Malcolm X, who had been assassinated the week before.
Later, President Johnson chanted on television, “We shall overcome.” A few months later, he signed the Voting Rights Act. Today there are more Black elected officials in Alabama and Mississippi than in any of the other states.
I first saw John Lewis at the Lincoln Memorial, when as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963. I first met him during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. SNCC was part of the Council of Federated Organizations which brought 1,000 mostly white volunteers to the state to register voters. In the end we organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to petition the National Convention in Atlantic City. John primarily worked out of COFO HQ in Jackson. I was project director in a small town outside of Greenville.
Later, after Malcolm’s assassination, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure) became head of SNCC. He was committed to the concept of Black Power, just Blacks organizing Blacks. John disagreed and went a different direction. John became one of the many civil rights activists who returned home to the South to continue organizing. John and I next encountered each other in the ‘70s, when I volunteered on the Southwest Georgia Project with Charles and Shirley Sherrod. He eventually ventured into electoral politics, as did Andy Young, Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond. In 1986 John was matched against his fellow activist, Bond, for a U.S. Congressional seat. John won in a close race. During the next 34 years he evolved into the “Conscience of the Congress.”
The next time I saw John in person was at the 50th anniversary of the Selma March in 2015 where he crossed the bridge one more time. Only that time he was accompanied by two men who had served as President of the United States, George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, the first African American to hold the office. Thousands of others joined them including many members of Congress, both Black and white. The night before there was no room at the inns of Selma. So, my wife and I stayed in a hotel room down the road a bit in Troy, John’s ancestral home.
The last time I saw John in person was last year in Baltimore at the funeral of Rep. Elijah Cummings. The second iconic photograph was also taken on the bridge. It shows a simple horse drawn carriage slowly crossing carrying the coffin of an American hero for one last time.
These days, we of a certain age spend a lot of time thinking about death. This makes young people under 60 uneasy. Some of them still think that are going to live forever. We know better. We have lost a lot of “O.G.’s” in a short time: John, Cummings, Joseph Lowery, C.T. Vivian, Charles Evers (Medgar’s brother and the first Black mayor in Mississippi). We have buried friends and family struck down by the plague, which is a particular horror to us, elder people of color. We are dying at 2 to 3 times the national average. Though he seemed to have passed too soon, John did not die from the virus but cancer.
I am the oldest surviving person in my biological family. In fact, I have been blessed to have lived longer than any man in my family, ever. As MLK said, “like any man, I want to live a long and fruitful life, but I’m not worried about that now.”
Last week we stood at the base of the Capitol steps to say our goodbyes to our brother John. I looked to him for guidance in how to use these bonus years. He found out about his cancer in December. How did he spend the last six months of his life? He made peace with his family, yes. Got his affairs in order, yes. Then he spent those last months as he had spent the last 60 years — in service to the cause of justice, equality, dignity and love. He spent those last months as he had spent his years, getting into trouble, good trouble.