Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a renowned civil rights leader and one of the original 13 freedom riders who, in 1961, nonviolently challenged segregation in the South, chronicled his role as one of the Big Six leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement in his 1998 autobiography, “Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement.”
This year, the congressman looks to the concerns of the next generation. In his new book, “Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change,” Lewis has written a map to peace for “the grassroots leaders who will emerge not for the sake of fame and fortune, but with a burning desire to do good.”
As Lewis writes, “it begins inside your own heart and mind.” His second book is small and focused. Like him, it is unmistakably genuine.
At a book signing at the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum, he told a story of one of the 40 times he was beaten during the nonviolent campaign to end segregation in the South. During the Freedom Rides, in a South Carolina bus station, a group of men kicked and punched him and left him lying in a pool of blood.
In his Capitol Hill office, 48 years later, a man came to visit him. It was one of his assailants. He came to ask forgiveness. Elwin Wilson had been reviewing the incident in his mind all that time. He was the only one of Lewis’s attackers who ever said he was sorry. Lewis embraced him.
They are still friends today, said Lewis. Some in the audience wiped tears as he spoke.
Lewis said that when he meets other legislators in the halls of Congress, he often greets each of them as a brother or a sister, even those who have introduced what he considers to be damaging legislation.
For him, nonviolence was always far more than a tactic needed in an unequal contest. He wrote, “The real battleground is on a higher ground, in the heart and the mind where love and truth will be the final victors.”
Lewis said he wrote the book because today’s civic atmosphere is in some ways more hateful than it was even during the 1960s. Never before has he seen decorum so lost, or dialogue so unkind. To him, it seems there is “no moral basis for anything we do as a society. Even raising the idea of what is good or what is best is seen as an irrelevant burden to any debate.”
In response to what he considers that moral decline, he wrote his book to share what tools helped him and the others end American apartheid.
They are faith, patience, study, truth, peace, love, and reconciliation. These are not abstractions to Lewis. He makes them concrete, with stories of how study, family heritage, and strategic preparation equipped King and others to do what they did; of legislation introduced over and over and over again in different congresses until it finally passed; and contemporary stories of how nonviolence has worked around the world.
At the end of his book, Lewis advises his readers to hold peace in their hearts, “knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won.”
John Lewis (D-Ga.) has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the only John F.
Kennedy “Profile in Courage” Lifetime Achievement Award.
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