relationship between his family and the white
civil rights bill offered “too little to late.” As the march
scraped by planting and harvesting cotton. It seemed
objected to Lewis’s language and threatened to
landowners. As sharecroppers, his family barely to him that they were working hard for nothing. “As
soon as I was able to make sense of the world, I could
see there was no way a person could get ahead as a tenant farmer,” he explained.
As a freshman at the American Baptist Theological
Seminary in Nashville in 1957, he tried to form a
campus chapter of the NAACP, but the school shot the idea down. Like many Black colleges, American
Baptist relied on white funding and didn’t want the risk of getting involved in the Movement. But Lewis persisted. One evening, he heard James Lawson
discuss the philosophy and tactics of nonviolence, and to Lewis, it felt like “it was something I’d been searching for my whole life.”
Memorial were the foundation of the Nashville Movement. Black
students
from
Fisk
University, American Baptist, and other local colleges
discussed and debated the principles of nonviolence. They studied the history of nonviolent struggle and
even engaged in role-playing exercises. In October
1959, the young people formed the Nashville Student Movement, and on February 13, 1960–less than two
weeks after the Greensboro sit-ins–the group initiated its own sit-ins in downtown Nashville.
In 1961, Lewis became one of the original freedom
riders and was badly beaten. In 1963, he became SNCC’s chairman. Representing SNCC at the March on Washington he criticized the Kennedy administration
for failing to protect the constitutional rights of Black Americans. With the help of Courtland Cox, James
Forman, Nancy Stern, and others, who drafted his speech, he charged that the Kennedy’s proposed Sources Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985). John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
10
FREEDOMRIDERS
60 Years
withdraw. Out of respect for A. Phillip Randolph, SNCC revised the speech at the last minute.
Nonetheless, “I felt defiance in every direction: against
the entrenched segregation of the South; against the neglect of the federal government; and also against
the conservative concerns of the established factions,” Lewis recalled.
John Lewis speaks from the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial at the March on Washington, August 1963, Danny Lyon, Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement 82, dektol.wordpress.com.
In 1965, Lewis was active at the height of the Selma voting rights campaign–a campaign SNCC
Lawson’s workshops in the basement of Clark Student
began, however, some of its other participants
had begun two years earlier. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, the marchers were viciously attacked by state
troopers and sheriff Jim Clark’s mounted posse. Lewis received a concussion and fractured skull.
Despite the injuries he received on Bloody Sunday, Lewis took part in the Selma-to-Montgomery march two weeks later.
Though he was subjected to incredible violence and
numerous arrests during his activist career, Lewis remained committed to philosophical nonviolence.
Lewis served as SNCC’s chairman until he was
replaced by Stokely Carmichael in May 1966. Many in SNCC felt that Lewis’s commitment to
nonviolent direct action and mass protests was out
of sync with SNCC’s turn away from such actions. Shortly after, he left the organization to pursue a long career in electoral politics–serving as a congressman from Georgia’s 5th congressional district for almost 30 years.
Interview with John Lewis by Blackside, Inc., May 14, 1979, Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton Collection, Washington University. Interview with John Lewis by Jack Bass and Walter Devries, November 20, 1973, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina. SNCC’s Speech from the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, Civil Rights Movement Veterans Website, Tougaloo College. Provided by https://snccdigital.org/people/john-lewis/.
