Lewis, John 1940–

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John Lewis 1940–

Politician, civil rights activist

A Democratic congressman from Georgia since 1986, John Lewis is perhaps best known for his prominence in the U.S. civil rights movement. As a strict follower of nonviolent social protest, Lewis was a relentless organizer and participant in numerous sit-ins, freedom rides, and protest marches throughout the South in the tumultuous years of the 1960s. “There were a lot of people who pretended they were civil rights heroes,” professor Roger Wilkins told Peter Applebome in the New York Times, but Lewis “was a true hero, an absolute hero, a man of absolute fearlessness and total integrity.” For the first half of the 1960s, Lewis served as chairman of the influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and later worked as a grass-roots organizer for the Field Foundation and ACTION. He shifted to mainstream politics in the early 1980s, first serving on Atlanta’s City Council and later as the representative from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. As a government official, Lewis still champions the civil rights message he once carried into the streets of the deep South. “A lot of young people who came to Mississippi or Selma or the Freedom Rides thought you could come for a summer, a semester, a year, and create something new,” Applebome quoted him as saying. “But most of us knew this is not a struggle that lasts one day or one week or one month or one lifetime.”

Lewis was born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama, the son of parents who operated a cotton and peanut farm in rural Pike County. As a young boy, he displayed a religious intensity and single-mindedness that would later characterize his unswerving dedication to civil rights. With aspirations to become a minister, he regularly preached to the chickens on his parents’ farm and also conducted baptisms for them. By the time he was a teenager—and despite a stammering voice and shyness—Lewis was a regular preacher in Baptist churches throughout the area. He became inspired in his ministerial pursuits by the weekly radio sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he listened to in the mid-1950s. The first person from his family to graduate from high school, Lewis moved at the age of seventeen to Nashville, Tennessee, where he began studies at the American Baptist Seminary. Lewis’s first opportunity to meet King came in the late 1950s, when Lewis enlisted the help of the civil rights leader with his plans to gain admittance to all-white, segregated Troy State College in Alabama.

At a Glance…

Born John Robert Lewis, February 21, 1940, in Troy, AL; son of Eddie and Willie Mae Lewis; married Lillian Miles, December 21, 1968; children: John Miles. Education: Attended American Baptist Seminary, c. 1957-58; Fisk University, B.A., 1967. Religion: Baptist. Politics: Democrat.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), cofounder, 1960, chairman, 1963-66; Field Foundation, New York City, associate director, 1966-67, director of community organization projects for Southern Regional Council, Nashville, TN, beginning 1967, and executive director of Voter Education Project, Atlanta, GA, 1970-77; ran for U.S. Congress, Fifth District, GA, 1977; ACTION, director of domestic operations, 1977-80; Atlanta City Council member, 1982-86; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC, Democratic congressman from Fifth District of Georgia, beginning 1986, chief deputy whip, 1991—.

Cofounder, Southern Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 1966; member, White House Conference on Civil Rights, 1966; trustee, Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation; member, advisory committee of biracial commission, Atlanta Board of Education; member of advisory board of Black Enterprises and of Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Social Change.

Awards: Named one of most influential blacks in the United States, Ebony, 1972; selected by Time as one of 200 rising leaders in the United States, 1974.

Member: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Scholarship, Education, and Defense Fund for Racial Equality; American Civil Liberties Union; Afro-American Institute.

When those plans failed to materialize, Lewis returned to Nashville and enrolled at Fisk University to pursue a degree in philosophy. There, influenced by theories of nonviolent forms of social protest, as well as the burgeoning efforts of blacks to protest segregation laws throughout the South, he took up the cause of civil rights. He became a student and follower of the teachings of clergyman and activist James Lawson. In 1960, Lewis and several other Nashville blacks conducted their first “sit-ins” in the city’s lunch counters, taking their place in “white-only” designated areas. Despite being repeatedly arrested by police and harassed by the community, Lewis and his comrades continued their protests throughout Nashville. Eventually they joined forces with leaders of similar student groups across the South to form what became known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Lewis—with an unwavering belief in civil rights and nonviolent protest, as well as a willingness to risk his own life—soon emerged as a foremost young leader of the civil rights movement. He was a frequent participant in the more dangerous forms of protest, including the so-called “freedom rides,” which challenged racial discrimination in bus facilities throughout the South. Lewis, like other freedom riders, endured vicious physical beatings, death threats, and numerous arrests for the rides, which were predominantly conducted in the summer of 1961. Lewis also led much-publicized marches against segregated movie theaters in Nashville, again prompting numerous arrests as well as physical and verbal assaults by local whites. Lewis’s staunch commitment to continue with such front-line protests—despite ever-present physical dangers—distinguished him as a role model of the early nonviolent protests. He was unanimously elected chairman of the SNCC in 1963, the same year in which he made a noteworthy speech at the march for civil rights in Washington, DC, criticizing the administration of President John F. Kennedy for not proceeding quickly enough with legislation ensuring civil rights.

As chairman of the SNCC, Lewis maintained a path of nonviolence toward achieving the goals of civil rights. Eventually, however, more militant elements of the organization—espousing principles of “Black Power”—began to grow restless with Lewis’s leadership. In 1966, he was ousted as SNCC chairman by Stokely Carmichael, and shortly thereafter resigned. Lewis went on to work for the Field Foundation, first as a director of community organization projects in the Nashville area, and eventually becoming director of the foundation’s Voter Education Project (VEP) based in Atlanta. As VEP director from 1970 until 1977, Lewis led grass roots efforts to organize southern black voters, to provide political education to young people, and to offer a variety of voter-assistance programs. In 1977, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to be director of U.S. operations for ACTION, a federal agency that oversees various economic recovery programs on the community level. That same year, Lewis first ran for public office, finishing second in the Democratic primary for Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District.

Wanting a more direct involvement with community groups, and critical of the federal government’s efforts to aid the poor, Lewis became more involved in mainstream politics. In 1982, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council, a position in which he became known for his close attention to the needs of the poor and elderly. Lewis’s popularity and respect among constituents became apparent in 1986, when he won a special run-off election for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Congress. Lewis’s opponent for the Democratic nomination was black Georgia state senator Julian Bond, a close SNCC ally of Lewis during the early days of the civil rights movement. Pitting two prominent civil rights figures against each other, the race captured national attention and was marked by Bonds’s charges of Lewis’s inarticulateness, as well as Lewis’s contention of Bonds’s drug abuse. In the end, as political observers pointed out, Lewis’s reputation as a diligent listener to the needs of black, elderly, and labor groups carried him past Bond and onto victory in the general election in November of 1986.

In his role as a U.S. congressman, Lewis has maintained a position as a prominent and respected figure who fights for civil rights in the United States. Some observers in the 1990s have argued, however, that he lacks effective strategies for adapting the movement to the current needs of blacks. In particular, Lewis has been criticized for his staunch support of the 1991 civil rights bill, which some Democrats and black leaders have attacked as ineffective because of its failure to address the economic needs of blacks. However, Lewis does possess, as Applebome noted, “a sense of what is missing in the civil rights debate: a sense of shared purpose, of basic morality, that speaks to blacks and whites alike.” In the fall of 1991, Lewis was appointed one of three chief deputy whips in the House of Representatives. According to Harold Ford, Jr., writing in Black Enterprise, “The move up positions Lewis … as one of the most influential members of the House.”