John Lewis died yesterday at the age of 80 after several months of treatment for pancreatic cancer. He was as great man unlike most any other, at least in our time, and not just because he championed using nonviolence as a force to cause change.
As the media will remind today, John Lewis was a member of Martin Luther King’s inner circle. His skull was cracked by police in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. He quietly continued the “fight” for racial equality after King’s death and was ultimately elected to represent a portion of the Atlanta area in Congress in 1986. He represented me and did so with patience, dignity and the honor he richly deserved.
I didn’t know Mr. Lewis, but I voted for him and happened to see him once on a flight from Washington to Atlanta. Unlike some other politicians, he flew coach, and I noticed from my seat how quietly respectful he was of the crew. I had a brief urge to speak to him and thank him for his life of service, but resisted out of respect for his privacy.
John Lewis lived as a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement and as a reminder that even now there is much work to be done. He taught others in Congress from across the country about things they only saw in the history books that were honest enough to include the ugliness of the opposition to equal rights for blacks. He took them to Selma and walked with them across that bridge, not to lecture but to shared talk about the experience. If you want to learn more, there is a documentary about him, John Lewis: Good Trouble currently on Prime Video.
The thing that impressed me most about John Lewis over the years is how rarely he used the word “I”. He referenced “Martin” and sometimes said “we”, but he seemed genuinely humble in the way of one who lives and leads by example. Perhaps I should say lived and led, but his memory and that example remains. In these sometimes brutal days of open backlash by some, we need that and him as much as ever.
Monuments to flawed and even terrible people are in the news presently, as we rightfully reassess history and reconsider values we have taken for granted. I think the conversation and process is a healthy one, even if it can be painful. In that way, it is somewhat like 1965 again. We need John Lewis now. It may be time to raise a monument to him, though I believe he’d want it to live in our hearts.
I will never forget and forever thank him. The tribute Joe Biden offered today rings true, “We are made in the image of God, and then there is John Lewis.”
