John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community chronicles one man’s quest for a more perfect union. An adventure of recent times, it is made exceptional by the way the narrative intersects with current events. It is the perfect book, at the right time.
Raymond Arsenault also offers the first full-length biography of the Georgia congressman and stalwart freedom-fighter. The book illuminates Lewis’s time as a planner and participant of protests, his service in Congress and his time as an American elder statesman.
Exemplary of Malcom X’s observation, “of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research,” Arsenault’s life of Lewis also brings to mind William Faulkner’s take on American life: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
John Robert Lewis was born into a poor family of sharecroppers in Alabama. Sharecropping amounted to slavery in all but name. White people owned the land and equipment. At the company store, seed and other supplies, from cornmeal to calico, were available on credit. The prices set for all this, and for the cotton harvest, were calculated to keep Black people in debt.
Recalling his childhood, Lewis was not referring to material wealth when he wrote: “The world I knew as a little boy was a rich, happy one … It was a small world … filled with family and friends.”
His school books made him aware of the unfairness of Jim Crow: “I knew names written in the front of our raggedy secondhand textbooks were white children’s names, and that these books had been new when they belonged to them.”
His parents and nine siblings’ initial indifference to learning proved frustrating. They viewed his emergent strength, which would help him withstand a career punctuated by arrests and beatings, as a means to help increase a meager income. First sent into the cotton fields at six, Lewis was frequently compelled to miss class through high school.
His political mission grew out of a religious calling. His was a gospel of justice and liberation. As a child he practiced preaching to a congregation of the chickens. In time, like Martin Luther King Jr, he was ordained a Baptist minister.
Inspired by Gandhi and Bayard Rustin as well as by King, Lewis also embraced non-violence in emulation of Jesus. He took to heart Christ’s call to turn the other cheek: love your enemy and love one another. He called his modeling of Christ’s confrontation with injustice “getting into good trouble”.
Education offered opportunities. In college, Lewis met and befriended likeminded young people. Helping form and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he attracted others eager to take action, as Freedom Riders or whatever else gaining equal treatment might take.
Lewis’s willingness to suffer attack while defending his beliefs gave him credibility like no other. The most remembered blow produced a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama. That barbaric 1965 assault against peaceful protesters came from authorities headed by George Wallace, the governor who said: “Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” A move to maintain white supremacy, the atrocity became known as “Bloody Sunday”.
Time after time, Lewis found unity among colleagues elusive. In 1963, at the March on Washington, four higher-ups insisted on softening his speech. Even so, his radicalized passion shone through.
Collaborating with Jack and Robert Kennedy, their self-satisfied delusion masquerading as optimism, was also problematic. Time and again, political expedience tempered the president and the attorney general in their commitment to civil rights. Sixty years on, among lessons Lewis attempted teaching was the inevitability of backlash following progress. If Barack Obama represented propulsion forward, the improbable installment of Donald Trump was like a race backward. Angering some, this was why, looking past Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Lewis endorsed for president the less exciting but more electable Joe Biden.
Lewis’s ability to forgive indicates something of his greatness. Of George Wallace’s plea for forgiveness, in 1986, he said: “It was almost like someone confessing to a priest.”
Rather like a priest, Lewis was admired across the House chamber. His moral compass was the “conscience of Congress”. Near the end of his life, in 2020, employing all his measured and collaborative demeanor, he exerted this standing in an attempt to restore the Voting Rights Act, gutted by a rightwing supreme court. Exhibiting what seemed to be endless resolve, he nearly succeeded.
•••
I met Lewis in 1993, in Miami, at the conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The event’s theme, “cultural diversity”, got more dubious by the day. Only Black people attended excellent Black history workshops. Only rich white people toured Palm Beach houses.
There were subsidized airfares, conference fees and accommodation for people of color. But I asked the Trust’s new president, Richard Moe, if it wouldn’t be good for the Trust to acquire Villa Lewaro, a house at Irvington, New York, once the residence of Madam CJ Walker, a Black business pioneer. Moe answered: “I intend to take the Trust out of the business of acquiring the houses of the rich.”
I hoped Lewis’s keynote address would deem preservation a civil right. It didn’t. Instead, Lewis lamented how high costs made preserving landmarks in poor Black neighborhoods an unaffordable luxury. Moe heartily concurred. I stood to protest.
Moe cut me off: “Mr Adams, you are making a statement, not asking a question. You are out of order!”
“No,” Lewis said. “The young man did ask a question! He asked: ‘Why in places like Harlem, with abatements and grants, taxpayers subsidize destruction, instead of preserving Black heritage?’ I never thought of it that way. And he’s right.”
In that moment, John Lewis became my hero. As a preservationist, I share his mission to obtain that Beloved Community. It is a place where inclusion is a right and where welcome is a given.
John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community is published in the US by Yale University Press
Michael Henry Adams is an architectural-cultural historian and historic preservation activist
