John Lewis (politician)
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John Lewis |
John Robert Lewis (born
February 21,
1940) is an
American politician and was an important leader in the
American Civil Rights Movement. He was president of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and led the struggle to end segregation. Lewis, a member of the
Democratic Party, has represented the 5th District of
Georgia(
map) in the
United States House of Representatives since
1987. The district encompasses almost all of
Atlanta.
Born in
Troy, Alabama, the son of
sharecroppers, Lewis was educated at the
American Baptist Theological Seminary and at
Fisk University, both in
Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local
sit-in movement. He participated in the
Freedom Rides to desegregate the South, and was a national leader in the strugle for civil rights. Lewis became nationally known after his prominent role on the
Selma to Montgomery marches, when police beat the nonviolently marching Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today.
Of John Lewis, the historian
Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's
I Have a Dream, (speech) was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force. [
1]
"John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a 'cooling-off period,' a moratorium on Freedom Rides.[
2]
"The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those eventsâ€"some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled."[
3]
On October 5, 1963, Zinn began an article called "The Battle-Scarred Youngsters" in
The Nation in this way:
Standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, John Lewis turned his wrath, not at the easy target, the Dixiecrats, but against the Administration...
To many, the March had been presented as a gigantic lobby for the Administration's Civil Rights Bill, but Lewis pointed quickly, unerringly, to the weaknesses in the bill. Furthermore, by sponsoring a new civil-rights bill, the Administration had skillfully turned attention to Congress, and deflected the erratic spotlight of the civil-rights movement from possibly focusing on inadequacies of the Executive.
The straight, crass fact at which John Lewis was aiming is this: the national government, without any new legislation, has the power to protect Negro voters and demonstrators from policemen's clubs, hoses and jailsâ€"and it has not used that power.
The full article was later reprinted in
Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973.[
4]
After leaving SNCC in 1966, Lewis worked with community organizations and was named community affairs director for the
National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.
Lewis first ran for elective office in
1977 when a vacancy occurred in Georgia's 5th District. A special election was called after President
Jimmy Carter appointed incumbent Congressman
Andrew Young to be U.S. ambassador to the
United Nations. Lewis lost the race to Atlanta City Councilman
Wyche Fowler. In
1981, Lewis was himself elected to the Atlanta City Council.
In
1986, when Fowler ran for the
United States Senate, Lewis defeated fellow civil rights leader
Julian Bond in the Democratic primary to succeed Fowler in the 5th District. This win was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic, majority-black 5th District. Lewis was the second African-American to represent Georgia in Congress since
Reconstruction. Young was the first. Lewis has been re-elected nine times without serious opposition, often with over 70 percent of the vote. He has been unopposed for reelection since
2002.
Since
1991, Lewis has been senior chief deputy whip in the Democratic caucus. He is a member of the
Congressional Black Caucus and
Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc..
Lewis is, according to the
Associated Press, "the first major House figure to suggest impeaching
George W. Bush," arguing that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the
National Security Agency to
conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said: "He is not King, he is president."[
5]
For many years he has been on the powerful
House Means and Ways Committee and is the ranking minority leader of its
Subcommittee on Oversight.
Lewis, an outspoken progressive and a staunch opponent of the
Iraq War, announced that he was endorsing
Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate in 2006 [
6].
*
Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1963-1973 (Library of America: 2003) ISBN 1931082294
*
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, (Harvest Books: 1999) ISBN 0156007088. The U.S. Congressman tells of life in the trenches of the Civil Rights movement, the numerous arrests, sit-ins, and marches that led to breaking down the barriers of discrimination in the South during the 1950s and 1960s.
* "I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a night stick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence."
* "I believe in nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living."
*
Official website* Academy of Achievement Profile http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lew0bio-1
* Academy of Achievement Biography http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lew0bio-1
* Academy of Achievement Interview http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lew0int-1
* Academy of Achievement Photo Gallery http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/lew0gal-1
*
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