Civil Rights Leader, Now a Congressman, Steadfast in His Message of Nonviolence

Oct. 19, 2011 7:02 a.m.
By Dennis LaRue
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- A man arrested and jailed more than 40 times has spent almost 25 years in the U.S. House of Representatives where he is one of its most respected members.

The minority leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has called him "the conscience of the U.S. Congress," a salute echoed by U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-17 Ohio, Tuesday morning at East High School.

The man is John Robert Lewis, the name he gave upon meeting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the first time in the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., on a Saturday early in the summer of 1958. King, who had invited him to leave his family's 110-acre farm, asked, "Are you the boy from Troy?"

Lewis was 17 and had written King about joining his efforts. King responded, enclosing a round-trip bus ticket. Lewis' father, a sharecropper who raised peanuts, hogs, cows and chickens, drove him to the bus station in Troy.

"I gave him [King] my full name," Lewis, D-5 Ga., told a joint assembly of Youngstown city high school students in the East High auditorium. "I am John Robert Lewis."

At 71, Lewis is the last of the "Big Six Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement." The other five were King, Whitney Young, A. Phillip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins.

Lewis spoke here yesterday as part of the Sojourn to the Past effort to educate students on the Civil Rights Movement and what life was like for blacks in the Jim Crow South, from separate water fountains to inferior schools. Sojourn defrays most of the travel and lodging expenses of high school students from throughout the United States who visit sites in the South where, in the 1960s, Civil Rights advocates confronted die-hard segregationists.

Lewis' message is the same he has delivered since he was one of the founders of SNCC (pronounced "Snick"), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in April 1960. SNCC was funded mostly by King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.Lewis assumed the leadership of SNCC in 1965.

Inspired by Mohandas Gandhi's success in winning India's freedom from Great Britain, King and Lewis preached nonviolence as the route for black Americans to achieve equality in the United States.

Nonviolence requires more than patience and the willingness to take a beating. So Lewis and his companions attended classes on nonviolence every Tuesday night in Nashville, Tenn., as he pursued his baccalaureate at American Baptist Theological Seminary and studied at nearby Fisk University.

In his speech, Lewis recounted episodes of his life as he worked for social justice and to ensure minorities had the right to vote.

The episodes were intended to illustrate that nothing worthwhile comes easily and that, as Ryan said, "Don't ever think that one person cannot make a difference. He believed in himself and his cause."

In what might be the most brutal incident of the Civil Rights Movement, March 7, 1965 -- what has become known as "Bloody Sunday" -- the Alabama State Police attacked 600 Civil Rights marchers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge outside Selma.

Police Major John Cloud gave the marchers three minutes to retreat, Lewis recalled. Hosea Williams, one of the leaders, asked Cloud, "Give us a minute to kneel in prayer," the congressman related. They had just fallen to their knees when, 90 seconds after his first order, Cloud ordered the troopers to advance with their nightsticks drawn.

"I thought I saw death," Lewis told a rapt audience. "I thought I was going to die."

The summer before the march on the Edmund Pettus bridge, three Civil Rights workers had been killed in Mississippi for trying to register blacks to vote.

And Lewis had been physically assaulted in restaurants in South Carolina for participating in sit-ins at lunch counters where only whites were allowed. Before his first sit-in in May 1961, Lewis recalled, he enjoyed his first meal in a Chinese restaurant in Washington, D.C., where he was advised, "Eat well. This may be your last meal."

The next day, May 9, in South Carolina, segregationists pulled him from the stool where he sat and "left me bloodied." At other protests, where no resistance was offered, Lewis suffered a fractured skull, broken ribs, had his hair pulled, was burned with cigarettes and beaten unconscious. Others in the movement allowed themselves to be doused full force with firehouses, sicked by police dogs, clubbed with batons and dragged long distances over sidewalks and streets.

The Freedom Riders saw the Greyhound and Trailways buses in which they traveled attacked and burned.

Being spat upon was the mildest of the physical attacks suffered, Lewis said.

Like Lewis, they arrived prepared to be arrested and spend time in jail. Before the march on the Edmund Pettus bridge, Lewis said, "I packed a backpack before they were fashionable." In it he packed an apple, an orange, a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, and two books.

Of his first arrest, Feb. 27, 1960, after participating in a sit-in, Lewis recalled, "I felt free. I felt liberated, that I had crossed over." It was six days after his 20th birthday.

He went on to deliver a key address in August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial where King delivered his "I have a dream," speech. He was with King and other movement leaders when they met with President Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy to help the president map strategy to advance racial equality. He saw passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Through it all, Lewis has been unwavering in his commitment to nonviolence. "When you see something that is not right," he told the students, "you have to move your feet. You have to act in a nonviolent way."