How Faith Inspired John Lewis’s Civil Rights Courage
Plus, Xi Jinpeng’s “four red lines”
As a young reporter on Capitol Hill in the mid-1990s, I encountered Rep. John Lewis. He was bald, and so I could see where his head had been bashed in by Alabama state troopers on March 7, 1965, during a Civil Rights march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.
“John Lewis: A Life,” a new biography by David Greenberg, who teaches at Rutgers, does a sensitive and perceptive job at answering probably the most interesting question about Lewis, which is the why. What motivated him? What gave him the courage to risk his life for the causes of desegregation and voting rights for black Americans? How did Lewis end up at the front of the line that afternoon on the bridge, on a day when others—even Martin Luther King Jr.—decided it was too dangerous?
Greenberg has an interview with another activist from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Coordinating Committee, Courtland Cox, who warned Lewis against participating. Cox said Lewis had “a bravery that some of us did not understand, that I didn’t understand. It had to do with John’s religious faith.”
That makes sense in the context. Born in 1940 in rural southeast Alabama, Lewis studied at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee,. He also was a student of Rev. James Lawson, who led informal sessions in Nashville and who was, in 1960, expelled from Vanderbilt University’s doctoral program as punishment for his Civil Rights activism. “The whole idea of nonviolence was based on the love ethic of the New Testament,” Lewis said. “Turn the other cheek, and be willing to accept the beating, to suffer, because it’s redemptive.”
Lewis said he had “faith that God would not allow his children to be punished for doing the right thing.”
“I was sitting there demanding a God-given right,” Lewis explained in a 1960 NBC documentary. “My soul became satisfied that I was right in what I was doing.”
Explaining to his professors at American Baptist why he was missing his scheduled senior sermon, he wrote, “I definitely feel that if the historical Jesus were here today, He would be in this jail cell with us for the same cause, the cause of justice and righteousness. Since he is not here, we must do what He would do.”
A potential problem with religious conviction as a motivation of political action is the risk that people may violently disagree about which side God is on. Greenberg is subtle on the point but manages to make it clear enough when he reports on a mob of “Klansmen and hard-core white supremacists” who, “armed with pipes, bricks, bats, and knives,” attacked a bus of freedom riders in 1961 on Mother's Day in Anniston, Alabama. “Their numbers had grown with the arrival of families coming from church, relishing a massacre the way their parents used to turn out for lynchings. Someone smashed the bus windows with an axe. Someone else hurled a gasoline-filled soda bottle through one of the holes….’Burn them alive!’ the mob screamed.”
Yet Lewis was unwilling to concede Christianity to the racists. For a thesis at Fisk University in 1967, he wrote a paper on “The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on Organized Religion in America.” He said, “I saw the civil rights movement as an extension of the church….as a real attempt to make organized religion relevant.”
This book had some surprise pleasures, among them a reminder of how the figures of the Civil Rights movement were some of the same people who cropped up to back Solidarity in Poland and thus help win the Cold War. There’s a scene in the book at a swimming pool in Westchester County, New York, with Tom Kahn (who later became international affairs director of the AFL-CIO), Rachelle Horowitz (an American Federation of Teachers official who married AFL-CIO leader Tom Donahue), and Penn Kemble (who Bill Clinton named deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency), and Kemble fishing John Lewis out of the water after Paul Feldman had tossed him in. Greenberg doesn’t mention what happened eventually to all these characters, but to anyone who knows the rest of the story, this is an amazing part of the history.
Lewis avoided the flirtations with radicalism and antisemitism that afflicted some parts of the Civil Rights movement. He skipped Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March.” Greenberg describes him as a founder of a Black-Jewish congressional caucus, a friend of and frequent visitor to Israel, someone who opposed “defund the police” and who even flirted with the idea of endorsing Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Lewis’s career as a congressman was anticlimactic, featuring somewhat clunky and overwrought efforts to compare the Democratic agenda-item of the day—passing Obamacare—to the Selma civil rights battle of the 1960s. Even Greenberg, who is certainly an admirer, allows that the gentleness, sincerity, and goodness of the Civil Rights leader could, in a politician, seem “self-righteous,” “self-aggrandizing,” or “holier-than-thou.” Depicting the election of Barack Obama or Joe Biden’s 2020 defeat of Donald Trump as the culminations of Lewis’s career can seem like forced attempts to add additional drama to a story that peaked on March 7, 1965, like moviemakers squeezing one more sequel out of a hit film.
The last line of Greenberg’s long book contends that “the guardians of liberalism would, for many years to come, draw sustenance and inspiration from John Lewis’s unconquerable soul.” It’s a beautiful final sentence to a wonderful story, but I’d edit the words “guardians of liberalism” to “all those who get from God the courage to fight for freedom.”
Xi’s red lines: I somehow missed this earlier this week but, from state-controlled Chinese media, “Xi says US must not cross four red lines.” As another article in the state-controlled China Daily put it, “The Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China's path and system, and China's development right are four red lines for China, which must not be challenged or crossed.”
Jack Burnham of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has more and advises, “the incoming administration should reject China’s red lines as unworkable both in principle and in practice. This rejection should be coupled with a strategy intended to decisively win the two countries’ strategic competition by engineering the emergence of a more liberal, non-threatening China capable of becoming a true partner to the United States.”
That is perhaps easier said than done. Yet it is better than permitting the Chinese Communists to extend their unfree system onto America by dictating that we stop advocating for democracy and human rights or that we not pursue an end to Communist Party rule. The reason Xi is so insistent that America not push on those issues is that, like all dictators, he knows how brittle and tenuous is his hold on power, and how much people would prefer freedom.