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Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

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Peak wingnut was a lie.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

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Let me file that under fuck it.

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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / John Lewis

John Lewis

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I’m going to interrupt your regularly scheduled political fundraising today in honor of John Lewis. The next few days after I’ll be doing all-Georgia fundraising. Here’s John Lewis dancing to Pharrell’s “Happy”.

Lewis was a brave, brave person.

Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966. He was repeatedly beaten senseless by Southern policemen and freelance hoodlums. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Ala., after he and others were attacked by hundreds of white people. He spent countless days and nights in county jails and 31 days in Mississippi’s notoriously brutal Parchman Penitentiary.

If you’re in a mood to give today, give to the NAACP. Truth is, it might do as much good politically anyway, given the organization’s great record with voting drives. We raised a good amount for them after the Doug Jones win in Alabama once before.

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Reader Interactions

32Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Your block quote is a good reminder that fascism isn’t new to America and the current fascism is not the worst we’ve ever seen.

    We shall overcome.

  2. 2.

    MomSense

    There is a clip taken right after this one where he starts dancing with people in the audience.  Damn I want to be a more joyful warrior.

  3. 3.

    cain

    I just wanted to say to do ‘satyagraha’ is incredibly difficult. Non-violence is not easy since we aren’t wired aggressiveness when attack (as most creatures are)

    Great video of him dancing to Happy. One of my favorite songs.

    Fuck Cancer, and Fuck this stupid year.

  6. 6.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I am so glad you’re planning to do an all-Georgia fundraiser soon. Please be sure to include Carolyn Bourdeaux, candidate for the open (R) 7th District seat. Let me know if you need information on her.

    I had the great honour and privilege to meet John Lewis a few times during my career at the Canadian Consulate General, Atlanta. He used to sponsor an annual multicultural/international festival “for the beloved community” in the heart of Atlanta, and about ten years ago I was the liaison from our office. Planning meetings took place at JL’s district office, and a couple of times he was there, met all of us, and showed genuine interest in our various countries and communities. At the actual festival he spent time at our booth* and gave me a huge bear hug, like a long-lost friend.

     

    My first encounter with him was in about 1989, when Canada was doing nonstop advocacy to persuade Congress to pass meaningful legislation to reduce acid rain. One of my early tasks was to phone  the district office of every member of Congress from the seven states of the southeastern US and get a reading on how they stood on the issue. Plenty of legislators, or at least their staffers, knew nothing about it, but when I dialled John Lewis’s office not only did he himself answer the phone on the first ring (!), but he was well informed about both the causes of and the environmental damage caused by acid rain.

    He was a smart man and a good one.

    *Somewhere I have a photo of him at the festival with one arm around me and the other draped across the cardboard shoulders of the lifesized cutout of a uniformed Mountie we used to take to public events.

  7. 7.

    WaterGirl

    @Baud: Did you watch the video of John Lewis speaking before the March on Washington?  (I assume it was just before.)  Amazing.

    So much of what he described is happening again today.  We owe this country to John Lewis as much as we do to the founding fathers.

  8. 8.

    Aleta

    John Robert Lewis was born in 1940 near the Black Belt town of Troy, Alabama. His parents were sharecroppers, and he grew up spending Sundays with a great-grandfather who was born into slavery, and hearing about the lynchings of Black men and women that were still a commonplace in the region. When Lewis was a few months old, the manager of a chicken farm named Jesse Thornton was lynched about twenty miles down the road, in the town of Luverne. His offense was referring to a police officer by his first name, not as “Mister.” …

    These stories, and the realities of Jim Crow-era segregation, prompted Lewis to become an American dissident. Steeped in the teachings of his church and the radio sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr., he left home for Nashville, to study theology and the tactics of nonviolent resistance. King teased him as “the boy from Troy,” the youngest face at the forefront of the movement. …

    Too often in this country, seeming progress is derailed, reversed, or overwhelmed. Bloody Sunday led directly to the passage of the Voting Rights Act––and yet suppressing the Black vote is a pillar of today’s Republican Party strategy. The election of the first African-American President was followed by a bigot running for election, and now reëlection, on a platform of racism and resentment. The murder of Jesse Thornton has its echoes in the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. …

    And so there were times when Lewis, who died on Friday, at the age of eighty, might have felt the temptation at times to give up, to give way. But it was probably his most salient characteristic that he always refused despair; with open eyes, he acknowledged the darkest chapters of American history yet insisted that change was always possible.

    David Remnick in the NYer

  10. 10.

    taumaturgo

    I came across this blog and I’m sorry if you decide to take a look at it and your mind is polluted by the racism and hate exhibited in the comments. I know that in social media posting the showing of empathy and compassion are not rewarded but at the death of a person with Mr. Lewis stature, human decency compels to at a minimum acknowledge it. Remember these are the supporters of Donald, Moscow Mitch, and all the GOP leadership.  https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/

  11. 11.

    cain

    @sukabi: 
    My girlfriend told me that the NAACP are a bunch of Uncle Toms and support white supremacy – that there is a natural coordination between them and the folks in power.

    I guess there are a number of black folks who feel that way about the NAACP. I would reckon that she would find NAACP fundraising so soon after his death to be contemptible.

  12. 12.

    greengoblin

    Done in memory of Joh Lewis one of the greatest Americans ever.  I want him remembered always.

    And agree:  rename the bridge!

  13. 13.

    Cheryl Rofer

    It’s worth remembering that, back in the 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was regarded as one of the more dangerously radical groups in the civil rights movement.

    We’ve come around to their position.

  14. 14.

    gwangung

    @Cheryl Rofer:

    It’s worth remembering that, back in the 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was regarded as one of the more dangerously radical groups in the civil rights movement.

     

    Marxist, even. And Communist.

  18. 18.

    Chief Oshkosh

    Back in another lifetime, I had reason to visit the hill a couple of times a year to advocate for causes in my field. I visited House and Senatorial offices for many states. Far and away the most informed and engaged people were in Lewis’ office. Mind you, my causes were not directly related to anything Lewis is known for, it’s just that he surrounded himself with COMPETENT people who took the job seriously and so would prep for our meetings on background and on what the Congressman thought about my issues. A breath of fresh air, especially because most of my calls were upon Republican offices (and they truly sucked, but that’s another story).

  19. 19.

    Another Scott

    @Aleta: Thanks for the excerpt.

    (One can always tell a NewYorker article because somewhere there will be at least one dieresis.  ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  20. 20.

    Another Scott

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-john-lewis-founded-third-american-republic/614371/

    Adam Serwer:

    The Alabama that John Lewis was born into in 1940 was a one-party authoritarian state. Forty years before Lewis was born, the white elite of Alabama, panicked by a populist revolt of white and Black workers, shut Black men out of politics in a campaign of terror, fraud, murder, and, finally, disenfranchisement.

    “We had to do it. Unfortunately, I say it was a necessity. We could not help ourselves,” Alabama Governor William C. Oates confessed. In 1901, the Montgomery Advertiser announced that with the new state constitution, “the putrid sore of negro suffrage is severed from the body of the commonwealth.” Such wholesale purges of Black Americans from the polity unfolded throughout the South, where the Democratic Party established a system of implacable white supremacy.

    Most of America’s Black population, when Lewis was born, lived in a white republic, where they were driven into poverty, disenfranchised, and denied basic civil and political rights through violence, custom, and law. More than one-third of Alabama’s population when Lewis was born was denied the right to vote.

    […]

    The vote is deadly serious business. We have to continue to fight for it, and use it to make the world better.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  21. 21.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @WaterGirl:

    It’s a print, and it’s buried in storage in a carton. Not sure when I’ll be able to get at it, but if and when I unearth it I’ll scan it and send it to you.

  25. 25.

    Rand Careaga

    Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966.

    So…a career criminal, I see (check out Steve M’s compilation of winger responses at “No More Mister Niceblog”—he got out of the boat in some of the steamier swamps of Right Blogistan so that we don’t have to. Shudder).

  27. 27.

    rikyrah

    ” I happen to believe that the vote is sacred. It’s the most powerful non-violent tool that we have in a democratic society.”
    —–Congressman John Lewis

  29. 29.

    Yutsano

    @Another Scott: They can take the blessed name of Representative John Lewis out of their fool damn mouths. And that’s me being the least harsh I can be.

  32. 32.

    Bonnie

    It is a sad year to have lost both John Lewis and Elijah Cummings in the same year.  Very sad.

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