John Lewis’ Final Lesson

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“[T]here’s a reason we’re all paying attention, because moral exemplars don’t come along every day.”—David Brooks [Set timer at 11:37] John Lewis was a great man in so many ways it’s hard to count them. His will was steel. Time and again, when others urged caution and delay, he marched ahead. This is not just a metaphor. When others hesitated, Lewis demanded that planned civil-rights marches go on. His will prevailed, despite credible threats from authorities and rabble that would have curdled a lesser man’s blood. In the iconic 1963 March on Washington, Lewis wanted to close his speech with following lines: “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.” The March leaders, including Dr. King himself, had to twist Lewis’ arm—hard—to get him to drop the inflammatory ending. That was one of the few times he ever backed down. Lewis had courage galore. He was jailed 40 times. Every time he marched, he expected jail, violence, even death. In those days of the KKK, lynching and rampant Southern white terrorism, his fears were reasonable, even prescient. The cracked skull that a white police riot gave him on “Bloody Sunday” was ample proof of that. Lewis was smart—a quality that aged into wisdom. He knew that his death, so soon after George Floyd’s murder, would mark a time of sober reckoning. So he penned a stirring call to action mere days before he died and got it published in the nation’s best newspapers. More than any other man I can think of, Lewis gave the lie to white supremacy. Faced with the example of Lewis himself, who could imagine that a nutcase who murdered nine innocent worshippers praying in church, or the trailer-trash father-son duo who murdered Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged, are “superior” just because of their race? Through all the hate and terror that came his way, Lewis never budged from nonviolence. Like Jesus himself, he declaimed the sin, not the sinner. He forgave those who trespassed against him and his. And he did so with a tranquility and humility that surprised and pleased all who met him. Even after his long years of struggle and success had jelled into fame, Lewis remained soft spoken and uniquely “approachable.” [Set timer at 12:20.] This less-remarked quality of Lewis—his humility—is, I think, his final lesson to us left behind. It may be his most important. We Americans consider ourselves “exceptional.” Yet we have clear minority rule here at home, and two of our most recent presidents won by nationwide minority votes (Dubya and Trump.) Still, we presume to instruct the world on democracy and good government. We are fighting (halfheartedly but still lethally) the two longest wars in our history, mostly for that reason. We are also fighting hard to throw off the yoke of our most morally vile, corrupt, and incompetent president ever. If we succeed, it will not be because of our much-vaunted institutions. Only some of us still honor them; our Constitution is, after all, just a piece of paper. It sets minority rule in stone, most abominably in our Senate. Could anyone believe that our nation as a whole would ever elect Mitch McConnell to anything? Our deliverance will not come because we saw the error of our ways. It certainly won’t come from an epiphany among Republicans, after all but Mitt Romney blessed our descent into Hell. Our salvation will come, if at all, because an unpredictable pandemic laid us low and cratered our economy. Our resultant national suffering has shown us beyond argument just how far we have sunk, and how misplaced is our national pride. So we Americans have a lot to be humble about. We should follow John Lewis’ example and cast aside the sin of pride, every one of us, both at home and abroad. For as John Lewis’ life so admirably taught us, humility does not mean submission or surrender. As we face this fall’s electoral Armageddon, one thing can reassure us. In the last century four great men of color wrought much-needed social and political revolutions against overwhelming odds. Their names are now legend: Mahatma Gandhi, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and John Lewis. Of those four, two were gunned down (Gandhi and King). Only Mandela and Lewis lived to die of “natural” causes. Lewis’ and Dr. King’s beneficent, nonviolent revolution is not nearly as advanced as Mandela’s. But we who collectively murdered our last secular saint can take solace that John Lewis died in peace, having had time to leave us a final message. A half-century after the three assassinations that destroyed my generation’s hopes and dreams, that’s progress of a sort. It ought to give us hope to carry on. The less we even dream of violence, and the more we focus obsessively on unity and voting, as Lewis did, the quicker our salvation will come.

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