Radicalism is only one half of John Lewis’ legacy. The other half is how he took his radicalism inside the establishment, forever changing the character of the Democratic Party
and countless other news outlets—Lewis stood firmly in the American radical tradition. No less strident in his condemnation of American hypocrisy than Frederick Douglass or W.E.B DuBois before him, he shined a spotlight on systemic injustice. He deployed nonviolence with an implicit understanding that it would generate social and economic disturbance and compel civic and business leaders to bend to the movement’s demands.
John Lewis was seemingly everywhere in the early 1960s. He was a founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in 1960. A year later, he was among the first dozen Freedom Riders who set out from Washington, D.C., to test the Interstate Commerce Commission’s ban on segregated accommodations at interstate bus terminals. On that journey, he was savagely beaten in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Montgomery, Alabama.
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Lewis did not deliver those words. At the insistence of nearly everyone senior to him in age—Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, labor leader Walter Reuther, Catholic Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle, NAACP chief Roy Wilkins—he struck a slightly more conciliatory tone. But even the revision, which Lewis and other student leaders swallowed with deep regret, wasn’t exactly designed to make moderates comfortable.
This wasn’t exactly right. McPherson knew all too well that backlash had been in evidence long before the movement grew more strident, and well before urban centers went up in flames. Much in the same way that today’s Black Lives Matter protesters are damned if they take a knee and damned if they take to the streets, Gallup found in 1963 that 60 percent of respondentsthe March on Washington, an event now revered as a crowning moment in America’s political development.
But people too seldom pause to reflect on the other side of the coin. Even as the Democratic Party lost its hold on white voters and began to cede the once-solid South to a more conservative Republican Party, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought millions of Black Southerners into the electorate and, almost instantaneously, the Democratic Party. Going forward, support for civil rights would become afor Democrats from the presidential level all the way down to local municipal races.
In 1977, a nationwide survey of Black mayors, city council members and state representatives found that 20 percent had been involved with community action programs in the prior decade, while many others worked or volunteered with a broader range of Great Society initiatives. Lewis’ trajectory—from civil rights leader to community organizer to the Atlanta City Council and then to Congress—was in many ways typical of this journey.
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