The Late Congressman John Lewis & the Importance of Training for Liberation
I remember pouring through the late Congressman John Lewis’s memoir, Walking With the Wind, years ago, when I was still in the thick of life as a young political organizer. His experiences and words gave me much needed reassurance that the hard toil of organizing I experienced—all the training, preparation, and long stretches of only incremental progress—were not a sign of my shortcomings in changing the world, but a hallmark of that kind of work.
Many people who have not been involved in social change movements think that watershed, transformative moments are the result of a confluence of passion and chance. But Rosa Parks did not refuse to move to the back of the bus just because she was tired. In fact, she was intentionally selected and trained in nonviolent direct action because she was the right person—respected and prominent in her community—to pull it off. When the moment arrived, a rapid response network was waiting in the wings, ready to use Parks’s action to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott. (It is worth noting that when unmarried and pregnant 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to move to the back of the bus and was arrested nine months before Parks, the movement did not mobilize in the same way, knowing she was not the strategic symbol the Civil Rights Movement needed at the time.)
Awakening can happen in an instant. But liberation—especially the collective kind—takes planning, discipline and preparation. This is true whether you’re talking about the kinds of material freedoms the Civil Rights Movement fought for or a more expansive spiritual freedom. And this is something that I feel strongly that John Lewis knew.
I remember several themes standing out to me in Lewis’s memoir:
The youthful daring and defiance of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the clashes they had with the older and more conservative wings of the Civil Rights Movement like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which went almost so far as to keep John Lewis from speaking on the National Mall at the Poor People’s March on Washington.
The long months and years of training in nonviolent direct action that SNCC supporters went through—sometimes as hard on white allies asked to role play cruel white southerners, dumping food and racial epithets on their Black friends’ heads as they prepared to occupy lunch counters.
Lewis’s relentlessness and disregard for himself, working long days and nights under unspeakable stress until he was hospitalized for several weeks with exhaustion, so physically frayed that he was not even allowed to watch televised news in his hospital room as he convalesced.
As we remember John Lewis, I most of all mourn the loss of an elder who challenged younger generations to be noisier and to risk more. He pushed us to go big, for Lewis’s fight was never restricted to just racial justice.
In my earliest activist days I heard that Congressman Lewis would sign on to an open letter I was managing calling for the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy activist and Nobel Peace Laureate, from house arrest in Burma. I was 19 years old and honestly did not know who John Lewis was—only that he had the title “Congressman” in front of his name. At the time, I could not draw a line between Atlanta and Rangoon that explained why he would care enough to lend his name to our cause, except that perhaps that was what members of Congress did. But today, with more of his story close to my heart, I know that racial justice was but one threshold he sought to cross in our larger, collective struggle for a liberation of the greatest kind.
On the day he was bloodied on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Lewis carried a book by the Christian monk Thomas Merton in his backpack. Merton, who inspired droves of the Greatest Generation to overwhelm monasteries and convents after World War II, driven mad by the senselessness of war and death and then wrestling with the deepest existential questions humans can ask. Merton, who was duly inspired by and studied in the work of D. T. Suzuki, the foremost Japanese Rinzai Zen priest and scholar. What an education in the transcendence of life and death Lewis’s very day to day must have been, steeped in this kind of writing while training people to do things that many of today’s activists consider superhuman.
What does it mean to train for not just nonviolence but for liberation? Sometimes it looks like the opposite of what you’d expect: manufacturing conditions of extreme anxiety and stress like a lunch counter role play so that we can learn to reflexively draw on the physical, mental, and spiritual strength needed to be the people we want to be even in the worst moments of our lives. The work of training in nonviolence can even look violent if we are going to learn to control the innate violence within ourselves as human beings. This is how we learn to know the true extent of our power and use it for the right purposes. If we’re going to be ready to face the greatest challenges of our lives, our training has to rise to a higher level than tactics and techniques.
Lewis always sought to convey this kind of daring and big thinking, urging people to “Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom comes, until a revolution is complete.” I will miss hearing his invocations to go all the way and his encouraging commentary on the struggles of our age. But I am glad that in his twilight years he seemed to have finally become satisfied with how noisy and ambitious the younger generation had become, finally ready to raise the personal risks they are willing to take for true freedom.
Image: Stephen F. Somerstein / Getty Images