Forums for Diversity - The Challenge for Birding Societies Everywhere

The racist legacy many birds carry

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/bird-names-racism-audubon/

The birding community faces a difficult debate about the names of species connected to enslavers, supremacists and grave robbers

By 

Darryl Fears

June 3, 2021

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Corina Newsome is a Black ornithologist, as rare as some of the birds she studies.

When she joined Georgia Audubon last year, the group’s executive director called her hiring a first step to “begin working to break down barriers” so that people from all communities can fully enjoy birding and the outdoors.

But overcoming those barriers will be daunting. As with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA, indelibly linked to its origin story. The challenge of how to move forward is roiling White ornithologists as they debate whether to change as many as 150 eponyms, names of birds that honor people with connections to slavery and supremacy.

The Bachman’s sparrow, Wallace’s fruit dove and other winged creatures bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.

Even John James Audubon’s name is fraught in a nation embroiled in a racial reckoning. Long the most recognized figure in North American birding for his detailed drawings of the continent’s species, he was also an enslaver who mocked abolitionists working to free Black people. Some of his behavior is so shameful that the 116-year-old National Audubon Society — the country’s premier bird conservation group, with 500 local chapters — hasn’t ruled out changing its name. An oriole, warbler and shearwater all share it.

“I am deeply troubled by the racist actions of John James Audubon and recognize how painful that legacy is for Black, Indigenous and people of color who are part of our staff, volunteers, donors and members,” interim chief executive Elizabeth Gray said in a statement in May. “Although we have begun to address this part of our history, we have a lot more to unpack.”

For Newsome, community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, the pain is real. When she first wore her organization’s work shirt, “I felt like I was wearing the name of an oppressor,” she said, “the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

She and other ornithologists of color deal with added layers of discomfort while doing research. Alex Troutman, a Black graduate student at Georgia Southern University, says he goes out of his way to smile and wave at every White passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible” and ease suspicions that he shouldn’t be there.

Corina Newsome, an ornithologist and community engagement manager for Georgia Audubon, is pushing to make her profession more diverse and inclusive. (Nydia Blas for The Washington Post)

Ornithologist Olivia Wang, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, says her field’s troubling, racist past must be addressed. (Michelle Mishina for The Washington Post)

Offensive eponyms compound that sense of not belonging. Despite professional and amateur birding groups’ declared commitment to diversity, only two names have been discarded.

The Townsend’s warbler and the Townsend’s solitaire still invoke John Kirk Townsend, whose journals detail his exploits in traditional Native Americans burial grounds in the West. Townsend, a Philadelphia-born ornithologist in the early 1800s, dug up and collected skulls for studies that sought to prove the inferiority of Indigenous people.

The Wallace’s owlet and five other birds honor Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist, explorer and anthropologist credited, along with Charles Darwin, for conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace’s writings frequently used the n-word, including in reference to the “little brown hairy baby” he boasted about caring for after fatally shooting her mother during an 1855 trip to the Malay Archipelago. Some historians believe they were orangutans.

Three birds, including the crimson Jameson’s firefinch, are named after another British naturalist involved in a heinous act committed against a young girl he purchased as “a joke” in 1888 during an expedition in Africa. James Sligo Jameson wrote in his journal that the girl was then given to a group of natives described to him as cannibals. He drew sketches of the child being stabbed and dismembered.

“Conservation has been driven by white patriarchy,” said J. Drew Lanham, a Black ornithologist and professor at Clemson University in South Carolina, “this whole idea of calling something a wilderness after you move people off it or exterminate them and that you get to take ownership.”

Lanham views the issues as part of a much larger historic pattern, one connected to the White enslavers who renamed Africans kidnapped from that continent’s West Coast. “They renamed an entire people” — cancel culture on a global scale, he noted.

In Honolulu, ornithologist Olivia Wang is equally harsh. She regards the honorifics that birds carry with disdain.

“They are a reminder that this field that I work in was primarily developed and shaped by people not like me, who probably would have viewed me as lesser,” said Wang, an Asian American graduate student at the University of Hawaii. “They are also a reminder of how Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering and exploiting and claiming ownership of things rather than learning from the humans who were already part of the ecosystem and had been living alongside these birds for lifetimes.”

Indeed, White explorers, conservationists and scientists who crossed the world conveniently ignored the fact that birds had been discovered, named and observed by native people for centuries before their arrival.

To the Cherokee, eagles are the awâ'hili and crows are kâgû. The English common name for the chickadee is a butchered translation of the Cherokee name, tsïkïlïlï. Similar-sounding names for other birds that English speakers renamed or mispronounced are scattered throughout East Coast tribes.

Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.

“A whole lot of Native people, in thinking about birds, don’t open a book of science. Their book of science is in the knowledge possessed by people in generations before them, the elders,” said Shepard Krech III, a professor emeritus at Brown University and author of “Spirits of the Air.”

Bird lovers have agitated to change eponyms linked to racists for several years but have encountered resistance.

It would cause confusion in the profession and among casual birders, opponents said. Books and ledgers would have to be revised, and people would have to learn new names. Only twice have such objections been overcome and the American Ornithological Society approved a switch. The first was for the oldsquaw, a species of waterfowl now known as the long-tailed duck. And last summer, the McCown’s longspur became the thick-billed longspur — the first time a name with a Confederate past was dropped.

By then, a confrontation in New York City had linked race and birding in an ugly way. In May 2020, Christian Cooper, a Black birder in Central Park, was falsely accused of threatening behavior by a White woman who called police on him after he asked her to leash her dog.

An expedition to Africa in the late 1880s, during which a young girl was cruelly killed, forever stained naturalist James Sligo Jameson's reputation. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

John James Audubon, long the most recognized figure in American birding, is now being reconsidered for his abhorrent views and actions against Black people during the early 1800s. (Bettmann Archive)

For the leaders of Audubon, the American Ornithological Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among other groups, systemic racism had hit home.

At the same time, activists in the ranks were growing more aggressive in opposing the eponyms. One of the loudest voices was that of Jordan Rutter, a White co-founder of Bird Names for Birds. She wanted to upend the society committee that names a species and reconsiders historic names.

“White people are credited for discovering [the birds]. White people were the ones to name the birds after other White people. And White people are still the folks that are perpetuating these names,” Rutter said in a recent interview.

A decade ago, that same committee unanimously refused to rename the Maui parrotbill, criticizing the proposed kiwikiu as “contrived,” ridiculous and hard to pronounce. As part of last year’s awakening, activists sought an actual transcript of the debate but were denied. “I called out the AOS and NACC for censoring some racist and offensive comments the [committee] made when discussing the … proposal,” Wang said, referring to the American Ornithological Society and its North American Classification Committee.

The society has since publicly apologized for those and other insensitive comments.

It is clear that leaders in the profession are listening more closely to the protests — and preparing to act. Audubon and the American Bird Conservancy, where Rutter works, have looked inward at their near-total lack of diversity and vowed to change. The American Ornithological Society pledged to “redoubl[e] our efforts toward making ornithology, birding, and access to the natural world equitable and inclusive.”

This spring, society president Mike Webster announced that the internal group responsible for bird names will now be guided by an advisory committee composed of people of different backgrounds — although 13 of the 17 advisers are White and the ethnicities of the four others have not been identified.

The new panel is “not just because we want to feel good about ourselves,” said Webster, who is White. “We see it [as] critically important to understanding and conserving birds. It’s critically important that we have a diversity of people out there doing it.”

A virtual panel discussion took place in April. Every major birding organization was represented, and 535 people joined from around the country as a majority of the panelists — nearly all of them White — agreed that it was time to move beyond racist eponyms.

Jeff Gordon, president of the American Birding Association, stressed that North America lost 3 billion birds over the past 50 years and that saving what’s left will need people of every ethnicity and background to be involved. “The biggest threat birds face … [is] being ignored to death,” he said. “Not enough people know and not enough people care.”

There is no timeline for decisions about the worst eponyms, but the discussion seems unlikely to wane, given participants such as Rutter and Newsome. Within days of the incident in Central Park last year, Newsome helped organize a very public declaration dubbed Black Birders Week — an event that quickly became a viral movement. By happenstance, it took place amid nationwide demonstrations and calls for racial justice following George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

The 28-year-old again took part in this year’s Black Birders Week, which began last weekend. She is encouraged by ornithology’s increasing focus on diversity and racism. She hopes it will soon extend to what the National Audubon Society and its chapters call themselves. “I believe they should both absolutely change the name. It feels wrong to enter African American communities … celebrating [Audubon’s] name,” she said. “It’s a reality I am wrestling with constantly.”

Yet far more progress is needed. Heads still turn when Newsome is in the field, observing birds. “I’m always questioned, in a seemingly friendly way, ‘Oh, what are you doing out here?’ ”

On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Across the muddy water is the Brunswick neighborhood where Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, was chased down and fatally shot in February 2020. Three White men have been indicted in the case. Newsome remembers driving past the neighborhood after the killing as she again headed toward the marsh.

“I felt like my soul couldn’t take being there anymore,” she said. “Like a Black person can’t even be what they’re called to be without encountering such violence.”

CORRECTION

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans. The story has been corrected.

About this story

Story editing by Susan Levine. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Copy editing by Carrie Camillo. Design and development by Leo Dominguez.

Bird photos by iStockphoto/Getty Images.

Darryl FearsFollow

Darryl Fears is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on the national staff who covers environmental justice. Over more than two decades at the Post, he has covered the Interior Department, the Chesapeake Bay, urban affairs and race & demographics. In that role, he helped conceptualize a multiple award-winning project, "Being A Black Man."

America is no longer as evangelical as it was

Amid Evangelical decline, growing split between young Christians and church eldersThe number of white evangelical Protestants fell from about 23 percent of the US population in 2006 to 17 percent in 2016, and only 11 percent are under 30, according to a survey of more than 100,000 Americans. | Christian Science Monitor

America is no longer as evangelical as

it was -- and here's why

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/10/opinions/american-evangelicals-protestantism-butler-bass/index.html

Opinion by Diana Butler Bass

July 11, 2021

Diana Butler Bass (@DianaButlerBass) is the author of 11 books on American religion and cultural trends, including her most recent, "Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way and Presence." She was a member of the Public Religion Research Institute board from 2008 to 2018. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.

In 1994, I quit.

Twenty years earlier, I'd been born again. I had grown up in a liberal Methodist church but started going to a nondenominational church with high school friends. When I told my friends that I'd given my life to Jesus, there were hugs and tears. Jesus embraced me, and so did they. I had a new family -- and everything changed.

Diana Butler Bass

I had not only converted to Jesus, but I'd entered another world, one with its own language, practices, ethics and expectations. I learned this sort of Christianity had a name: "Evangelical" meaning "good news." And it seemed very good to me. Evangelical faith was warm, assuring, enthusiastic, serious and deeply pious. I attended an evangelical college, graduated from an evangelical seminary and did doctoral work with a leading evangelical scholar. I was proud to be evangelical.

Evangelical Christianity was everything to me back then: faith, work, friends, life. It stayed that way until my questions started. Evangelicalism became the religious right, it became obvious that women would never be accepted as leaders, and closeted gay evangelical friends died of AIDS.

After a protracted internal struggle, I couldn't do it anymore. I joined a liberal Episcopal church, returning to the kind of mainline Protestantism I'd known before being born again.

It was hard leaving evangelical Christianity. Through the years, I'd occasionally meet someone who had a similar experience, but such encounters were often random, or felt furtive. Mostly, when it came to my spiritual journey, I've felt alone. Until this week.

On July 8, the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) released its American Religious Landscape survey for 2020. The report resembled those of recent years, affirming now-familiar trends shaping 21st century American religion: increasing racial diversity in Christian communities, the sizable presence of world religions other than Christianity and the explosive growth of those who are religiously unaffiliated.

In other words, there were no major surprises -- except one. Unlike previous surveys, this one showed that the decline among White Christians has slowed. Indeed, the percentage of White Christians actually rose slightly due to growth in an unlikely category -- an increase among white mainline Protestants, "an uptick" of 3.5% in their proportion of the American population.

This uptick is especially surprising when compared to the drop in White evangelical Protestantism. The report pointedly states: "Since 2006, white evangelical Protestants have experienced the most precipitous drop in affiliation, shrinking from 23% of Americans in 2006 to 14% in 2020."

White mainline Protestantism is growing; White evangelicalism is declining. And that is big news.

Most researchers divide White American Protestantism into two large families: Evangelical and mainline. Evangelicalism comprises a multitude of theologically conservative Protestants who typically belong to groups such as the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God or to independent, nondenominational mega-church congregations.

Mainline Protestantism (sometimes referred to as "old-line," "mainstream," or "ecumenical") is an umbrella designation for those more theologically moderate and liberal Protestants who identify with the Episcopal Church (TEC), Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA), United Methodist Church (UMC), United Church of Christ (UCC) or the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

Chances are that if you grew up Protestant and attending church in America, you worshipped on one side of this divide or the other, even if you did not know this history or which camp your church was in. Or, like me, you moved between them, as I was first mainline, then evangelical, and then mainline again.

PRRI indicates that the mainline rebound is significant: "The slight increase in white Christians between 2018 and 2020 was driven primarily by an uptick in the proportion of white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants... Since 2007, white mainline (non-evangelical) Protestants have declined from 19% of the population to a low of 13% in 2016, but the last three years have seen small but steady increases, up to 16% in 2020."

For several years, observers have noted the decline of White evangelicalism. As white evangelical numbers declined, the percentage of religiously unaffiliated Americans went up. There appeared to be a correlation between the two -- ex-evangelicals moved to the "none" category. Over the last three years, however, the unaffiliated category has stabilized while the white evangelical exodus continued. At the same time, the white mainline category has risen.

This shift suggests that some portion of ex-evangelicals are finding their way toward mainline or another non-evangelical Protestant sense of identity.

This doesn't mean that Americans are necessarily returning to mainline churches in droves. The PRRI study is not about church attendance or membership. It isn't about what people do. It is about identity - labels people use to describe their religious lives. The data suggests that White Protestants are distancing themselves from "evangelical." Many apparently leave religion altogether. But others -- whose numbers might be that modest "uptick" -- may be reacquainting themselves with mainline Protestantism.

Dividing Protestants into two categories goes back to the early 20th century when the two groups were called "fundamentalists" and "modernists." In the 1920s, Protestants quarreled over the Bible and evolution, their churches and seminaries split. The two factions largely went their separate ways, eventually morphing into "evangelicals" and "mainliners" as they are called today.

In the middle decades of the 20th century, mainline Protestants held more cultural and political power. By the mid-1970s, however, their numbers -- and influence -- began a rapid decline.

As the mainline went into a demographic tailspin, evangelicals fought for greater recognition in politics and culture, surprising nearly everyone with the size of their churches, the energy of their organizations and a kind of expressive spirituality. Their robust ascent into the public conversation, their political acumen and their fundraising prowess, transformed American politics and church life seemingly overnight.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, mainline Protestantism faded from public view. "Evangelical" became coterminous with "Protestant." If one was born after 1980, it was hard to know that mainline Protestantism even existed.

Pendulums do, however, swing. And it could be that this is the historical moment when America's Protestant pendulum is moving away from its evangelical side to its more liberal one once again.

What is certain is that America is no longer as evangelical as it was. But it is not as mainline as it was in the mid-20th century either. Both terms used to describe American Protestantism are more fluid than most people know, and both "evangelical" and "mainline" are undergoing changes. This may lead to a genuine renewal of the old mainline Protestant denominations -- it is too early to tell. This shift, however, will have political and social consequences.

Ultimately, data is about stories. This recent PRRI poll suggests a new one may be unfolding.

Beyond scholarly speculation, analytical research and historical theories, however, numbers also quantify the experiences of real people. There are millions of stories -- enough to now show up as data -- of spiritual journeys of those who have left evangelicalism and are searching for a new sense of identity, deeper meaning and a place to call home.

- DBB

[WP] The rapid decline of White evangelical America?

[RNS] The ‘nones’ are growing — and growing more diverse

Religious disaffiliation has risen in every generation, including even older Americans, though the sharpest spike in nones is occurring with the millennials.

Amazon Link

Winner of the 2019 Grawemeyer Award in Religion

Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, spells out the profound political and cultural consequences of a new reality—that America is no longer a majority white Christian nation. “Quite possibly the most illuminating text for this election year” (The New York Times Book Review).

For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white, Christian nation.

Drawing on more than four decades of polling data, The End of White Christian America explains and analyzes the waning vitality of WCA. Robert P. Jones argues that the visceral nature of today’s most heated issues—the vociferous arguments around same-sex marriage and religious and sexual liberty, the rise of the Tea Party following the election of our first black president, and stark disagreements between black and white Americans over the fairness of the criminal justice system—can only be understood against the backdrop of white Christians’ anxieties as America’s racial and religious topography shifts around them.

Beyond 2016, the descendants of WCA will lack the political power they once had to set the terms of the nation’s debate over values and morals and to determine election outcomes. Looking ahead, Jones forecasts the ways that they might adjust to find their place in the new America—and the consequences for us all if they don’t. “Jones’s analysis is an insightful combination of history, sociology, religious studies, and political science….This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers across the political spectrum” (Library Journal).

Amazon Link

Does process theology have something to say about political and social issues and our response to them?

In this short book, Bruce Epperly says that it has much to say, and can shape not just the ethics and policies of a better world, but also the way in which we debate and decide those policies. Process theology invites discussion and even guides us toward acceptable and positive compromises.

No major political issue of the western world is excluded from this discussion. From immigration to criminal justice, from abortion to reproductive health, from the environment to economic development, process thinking can help guide examination, shaping, and implementation of solutions for a troubled world.

This book is suitable for individual reading by anyone who wants to take a fresh look at policy from an open-minded, progressive point of view. It can also be helpful in group studies for those who want to study how to apply prophetic proclamation to daily living.

Christian Humanism - John Lewis: Love in Action

John Lewis and John Cobb on Love

https://www.openhorizons.org/john-lewis-and-john-cobb-on-love.html

by Jay McDaniel

​

John Lewis

I think sometimes people are afraid to say I love you. But we’re afraid to say, especially in public life, many elected officials or worldly elected officials, are afraid to talk about love. Maybe people tend to think something is so emotional about it. Maybe it’s a sign of weakness. And we’re not supposed to cry. We’re supposed to be strong, but love is strong. Love is powerful.

The movement created what I like to call a nonviolent revolution. It was love at its best. It’s one of the highest form of love. That you beat me, you arrest me, you take me to jail, you almost kill me, but in spite of that, I’m going to still love you. I know Dr. King used to joke sometime and say things like, “Just love the hell outta everybody. Just love ’em.”

*

I think all of us in life, not just in the Western world, but all over the world, we need to come to that point. We need to evolve to that plane, to that level where we’re not ashamed to say to someone, “I love you, I’m sorry, Pardon me, Will you please forgive me? Excuse me.” What is it? Have we lost something? Can we be just human and say I love you? I think so — so many occasions we think of love as being romantic and all of that, but just love because it’s good in itself, just love living creatures.

*

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But the teaching, the training, the reading, and coming in contact with great teachers. Martin Luther King Jr. had a tremendous influence on me and the reading and the study of Gandhi.

When I saw the film several years ago of Gandhi and saw the march to the sea, it reminded me of the march from Selma to Montgomery. That there come a time where you have to be prepared to literally put your physical body in the way to go against something that is evil, unjust, and you prepare to suffer the consequences.

But whatever you do, whatever your response is, is with love, kindness, and that sense of faith. In my religious tradition is this belief that it’s going to work out. It is going to work out. It’s all going to be all right. And people will ask me from time to time, “What shall we do, John, during the sit-ins or during the freedom rides?” And I would say, “We need to find a way to dramatize the issue. We need to find a way to get in the way, but it should be in a peaceful, loving, nonviolent fashion.” Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.

- John Lewis interview with Krista Tippett in On Being

John Cobb

​One wonders whether history must always be like this, with "us" feeling that we are justified in taking any action that will support our side against "them."  We process folk say "No." All of us are composed of our relations to our own past but also to the myriad of "others."  We are truly members one of another.  The wounds of others wound us. Their genuine fulfillment fulfills us.  This is true not only of those we call "friends."  It is true of those we call "foes."

Whitehead noticed in the extraordinary "Galilean origins of Christianity" an emphasis on "the tender elements in the world which slowly and in quietness operate by love."  A Hindu, Gandhi, noticed that Jesus called us to love our enemies, and he incorporated not only love of the British but also Hindu love of Muslims and vice versa into his successful struggle to free India from British rule.  A Christian, Martin Luther King, learned from  Gandhi that we need not treat Jesus' teaching as simply impractical idealism, and he broke his people out of segregation.  Another Christian, Nelson Mandela, invented a truth and reconciliation program that also expressed a realistic love of enemy. Indeed, if we search through history, alongside the thousands of instances of treachery and cruelty, of deceit and revenge, here and there people have attained freedom and justice while expressing love for their oppressors, 

​This has two advantages.  Hatred and violence toward others may win a battle here and there, or even build an empire, but the hatred engendered in the defeated festers in them and endangers whatever may have been gained.  Killing leads to more killing, but the independence of India has not resulted in a bitter Britain.  Whereas even today the scars on the white Southern psyche from the Civil War corrupt American politics,  the desegregation of public facilities is genuinely accepted by most white Southerners without rancor,  It is hatred, deceit, and violence that are unrealistic solutions to human problems.  They are leading the world toward the suicide of the human species. Love is the realistic answer.

-- John Cobb, Love is the Realistic Answer

John Lewis — Love in Action

The On Being Project:

We take in the extraordinary wisdom of Congressman John Lewis on what happened in Selma on Bloody Sunday and beyond — and how it might inform common life today. A rare look inside the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation with themselves — and their intricate art of “love in action.” (Original Air Date: March 28, 2013)

About the Guest:

John Lewis is a member of the United States House of Representatives from Georgia’s 5th District. He is the author of “Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” “Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change,” and “March,” a three-part graphic novel series.

Visit our website to read the transcript, download the episode, or listen to the unedited interview: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-lew...

Visit our On Being Classics Library, where this episode is featured:
https://onbeing.org/libraries/classics/

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FILE - In this Thursday, May 10, 2007 file photo, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, R-Ga., in his office on Capitol Hill, in Washington. Lewis, who carried the struggle against racial discrimination from Southern battlegrounds of the 1960s to the halls of Congress, died Friday, July 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)AP

John Lewis: Good Trouble - Official Trailer

Using interviews and rare archival footage, JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE chronicles Lewis’ 60-plus years of social activism and legislative action on civil rights, voting rights, gun control, health-care reform and immigration. Using present-day interviews with Lewis, now 80 years old, Porter explores his childhood experiences, his inspiring family and his fateful meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957. In addition to her interviews with Lewis and his family, Porter’s primarily cinéma verité film also includes interviews with political leaders, Congressional colleagues, and other people who figure prominently in his life.

Rep John Lewis’ Speech at March on Washington

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John Lewis: ‘Good troublemaker’ and tireless activist

a look at the life of the civil rights icon

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/john-lewis-good-troublemaker-and-tireless-activist-a-look-at-the-life-of-the-civil-rights-icon

by Catherine Park

July 18, 2020 | NewsFOX TV Digital Team

John Lewis  - the good troublemaker and the conscience of Congress.

ATLANTA - Rep. John Lewis was known as one of the foremost prolific advocates for securing civil liberties, protecting human rights and building what he called “The Beloved Community” in America, according to his biography.

After a battle with pancreatic cancer, Lewis died at the age of 80 on July 17, but his legacy left an indelible mark on the history of the nation.

The representative from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, known for getting into “good trouble,” was outspoken on civil rights issues, spending a large part of his life peacefully protesting and seeking justice and equity for the underrepresented.

A timeline of his life’s work showcases Lewis’ commitment to the tireless pursuit of equality over more than six decades, from the early days of the civil rights movement to 2020.

Feb. 21, 1940

Born in Troy, Alabama, John Lewis grew up in a segregated society where, even as a young boy, he was inspired by the activism surrounding the larger civil rights events that happened in his home state.

1955-1956: Montgomery Bus Boycott & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 13-month protest that started in December of 1955 when John Lewis was 15 years old, ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling segregation on public buses unconstitutional. Lewis cited the impact of the boycott, along with the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as some of the key elements that pushed him to get involved in the civil rights movement, according to his biography.

"It was during the Montgomery Bus Boycott that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then a young preacher and the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, emerged at the forefront of the movement for civil rights and social justice in America," Lewis said on the 59th anniversary of the boycott. "Today the work that Rosa Parks began and Dr. King directed is studied by non-violent activists all over the world, who use it to discover the ways and the means they can use to challenge injustice in every corner of the globe."

"We are fortunate that the example of Rosa Parks and Dr. King are so accessible to us as Americans. They are no longer with us, but the ideas they stood for define a great legacy and the work they have left for us to do still remains... What they did and how they did it can inform the activism of today and help push our nation forward into the next phase of our destiny until we reach the day when this nation becomes a truly multi-racial democracy that values the dignity and the worth of every human being."

1960: John Lewis and others organize citywide sit-in to end segregated lunch counters

In one of his first notable demonstrations during the civil rights era, Lewis organized a sit-in as a student attending Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in response to the segregated lunch counters across the state on Feb. 13, 1960.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to which Lewis was was appointed chairman, was largely responsible for organizing student activism during the civil rights movement, including sit-ins and other activities.

1961: John Lewis and the Freedom Riders

During the Freedom Rides, which began in May of 1961, Lewis volunteered to help challenge the segregated interstate bus terminals across the South, and even risked his life on more than one occasion.

Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-in protests, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted, according to Smithsonian Magazine. While trying to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs.

Less than two weeks later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal," Lewis said. "We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back."

A mug shot of civil rights activist and politician John Lewis, following his arrest in Jackson, Mississippi for using a restroom reserved for "White" people during the Freedom Ride demonstration against racial segregation on May 24, 1961. ((Photo by Kypros/Getty Images))

1963: March on Washington

By 1963, John Lewis was named one of the “big six” leaders of the civil rights movement. At the age of 23, he helped organize and was a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington in August 1963, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, according to his biography.

“A first draft of Lewis’ prepared speech, circulated before the march, was denounced by Reuther, Burke Marshall, and Patrick O’Boyle, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C., for its militant tone,” according to The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

“‘In the speech’s original version, Lewis charged that the Kennedy administration’s proposed Civil Rights Act was ’too little and too late,’ and threatened not only to march in Washington but to ‘march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We will pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy’. In a caucus that included King, Randolph, and SNCC’s James Forman, Lewis agreed to eliminate those and other phrases, but believed that in its final form his address ‘was still a strong speech, very strong,’” the Stanford MLK institute continued.

According to Stanford, the march pressured the John F. Kennedy administration to introduce a strong federal civil rights bill in Congress.

“After the march, King and other civil rights leaders met with President Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House, where they discussed the need for bipartisan support of civil rights legislation. Though they were passed after Kennedy’s death, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 reflect the demands of the march,” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University wrote.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., (center) is escorted into a mass meeting at Fish University in Nashville. His colleagues are, left to right, John Lewis, national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Committee and Lester McKinnie, on of the leaders in the racial demonstrations in Nashville recently. King gave the main address to a packed crowd. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

1964: Mississippi Freedom Summer

In June of 1964, John Lewis coordinated SNCC efforts to organize voter registration drives and community action programs during the Mississippi Freedom Summer, according to his biography.

When SNCC activist Robert Moses launched a voter registration drive in Mississippi in 1961, “he confronted a system that regularly used segregation laws and fear tactics to disenfranchise black citizens,” according to SNCC. It was during this time that Lewis helped create political momentum for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to his biography.

1965: March on Selma and Bloody Sunday

Lewis, as well as Hosea Williams, along with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led over 600 peaceful protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.

They intended to march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate the need for voting rights in the state, but marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers in a violent confrontation that came to be known as "Bloody Sunday."

Dr Martin Luther King Jr., arm in arm with Reverend Ralph Abernathy, leads marchers as they begin the Selma to Montgomery civil rights march from Brown's Chapel Church in Selma, Alabama, on March 21, 1965; (L-R) an unidentified priest and man, John Lewis, an unidentified nun, Ralph Abernathy), Martin Luther King Jr, Ralph Bunche, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Fred Shuttlesworth. ((Photo by William Lovelace/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images))

News coverage of “Bloody Sunday,” outraged the nation. Lewis, who was severely beaten on the head, said: “I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam—I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo—I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa and can’t send troops to Selma,” according to The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

Despite more than “40 arrests, physical attacks and serious injuries, Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence,” his biography stated.

A sign marking the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march is seen on March 5, 2015 in Selma, Alabama. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

1966: John Lewis becomes director of the Voter Education Project

John Lewis left the SNCC in May of 1966 and continued his commitment to the civil rights movement as associate director of the Field Foundation, participating in the Southern Regional Council's voter registration programs, according to his biography.

He went on to become the director of the Voter Education Project (VEP) and was instrumental in adding nearly 4 million minorities to the voter rolls.

1977: John Lewis appointed to ACTION

John Lewis was the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize in 1975 and in 1977 and was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to direct more than 250,000 volunteers of ACTION, the umbrella federal volunteer agency that included the Peace Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), according to his biography.

“In 1971, the VISTA program was transferred from the Office of Economic Opportunity to the former Federal agency ACTION (the Federal Domestic Volunteer Agency). In 1973, Congress enacted the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973 (DVSA), the VISTA program's enabling legislation,” according to the Federal Register.

The VISTA program continues to retain its purpose, as stated in the DVSA, “to strengthen and supplement efforts to eliminate and alleviate poverty and poverty-related problems in the United States by encouraging and enabling individuals from all walks of life, all geographical areas, and all age groups, including low-income individuals, elderly and retired Americans, to perform meaningful and constructive volunteer service in agencies, institutions, and situations where the application of human talent and dedication may assist in the solution of poverty and poverty-related problems and secure and exploit opportunities for self-advancement by individuals afflicted with such problems.”

1981: John Lewis elected to the Atlanta City Council

Lewis was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981 after leaving ACTION, and during his time serving on the council, he was an advocate for ethics in government and neighborhood preservation.

One notable action Lewis pursued during his first year on the council was to preserve the neighborhoods in Atlanta by opposing the Great Park plan

.Lewis was convinced that the road would negatively impact the neighborhoods through which it would pass, as well as the city as a whole, according to The Atlanta Weekly. He believed it would clog up downtown traffic and would further deprive the poor, black inner-city communities of opportunities. "I don't think the people in the mayor's office ever really thought about what this would do for Atlanta," he said. "To this day, I don't know anything that would justify building it."

"Almost from the first day of council I got in trouble, what I call good trouble," Lewis said in a 1982 interview with The Atlanta Weekly. "I think it was the first session of council, I introduced a resolution saying that 'Atlanta will go on record opposing a four-lane road through the Great Park.' It was passed unanimously by council, and the mayor signed it. Then one and a half, two months later, word came down that the mayor had a plan for a road. I was surprised, dismayed," Lewis told the newspaper. "I don't know, but my feeling is that even before the plan came into being, the mayor had made a commitment to President Carter and to [Department of Transportation Commissioner] Tom Moreland, that he was locked in and had to tell planners to include the road."

In the end, the Great Park plan, including the road, passed the City Council, with Lewis, Bill Campbell and Myrtle Davis, the three newly elected black council members, voting against it.

A smaller version of the road would eventually become Presidential Parkway, later renamed John Lewis Freedom Parkway in August of 2018.

1986: John Lewis is elected to Congress

Lewis was elected to Congress in November 1986, and had served as U.S. representative of Georgia's Fifth Congressional District since then.

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., stands on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in between television interviews on Feb. 14, 2015. Rep. Lewis was beaten by police on the bridge on "Bloody Sunday" on March 7, 1965, during a march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery.

He was the Senior Chief Deputy Whip for the Democratic Party and was also a member of the House Ways & Means Committee, a member of its Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, according to his biography.

He was also a key sponsor in many bills, including, but not limited to:

-Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Reauthorization Act of 2016 (H.R. 5067 114th)

-Medicare and Medicaid Extenders Act of 2010 (H.R. 4994 111th)

-National Museum of African American History and Culture Act (H.R. 3491 108th)

-Selma to Montgomery National Trail Study Act of 1989 (H.R. 3834 101st)

2001-2002: John Lewis awarded the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and the NAACP Spingarn Award

In May of 2001, Lewis received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award and in 2002, he was awarded the NAACP Spingarn Award, which is given “first to call the attention of the American people to the existence of distinguished merit and achievement among Americans of African descent, and secondly, to serve as a reward for such achievement, and as a stimulus to the ambition of colored youth,” according to the NAACP website.

2011: John Lewis awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom

On Feb. 15, 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Lewis the nation’s highest civilian honor, the 2010 Medal of Freedom.

"John Lewis is an American hero and a giant of the Civil Rights Movement," a statement issued by the White House read.

Obama echoed the sentiment. “There’s a quote inscribed over a doorway in Nashville, where students first refused to leave lunch counters 51 years ago this February,” Obama said during the medal presentation ceremony in 2011. “And the quote said, ‘If not us, then who? If not now, then when?’ It’s a question John Lewis has been asking his entire life.”

Rep. John Lewis is presented with the 2010 Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama during an East Room event at the White House February 15, 2011 in Washington, D.C.

“It’s what led him back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma after he had already been beaten within an inch of his life days before,” Obama continued. “It’s why, time and again, he faced down death so that all of us could share equally in the joys of life. It’s why all these years later, he is known as the Conscience of the United States Congress, still speaking his mind on issues of justice and equality. And generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.”

2019: John Lewis diagnosed with pancreatic cancer

It was announced in a statement on Dec. 29, 2019 that Lewis had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

“I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now,” Lewis said in the statement. “This month in a routine medical visit, and subsequent tests, doctors discovered Stage IV pancreatic cancer. This diagnosis has been reconfirmed. While I am clear-eyed about the prognosis, doctors have told me that recent medical advances have made this type of cancer treatable in many cases, that treatment options are no longer as debilitating as they once were, and that I have a fighting chance. So I have decided to do what I know to do and do what I have always done: I am going to fight it and keep fighting for the Beloved Community. We still have many bridges to cross,” the statement continued.

“To my constituents: being your representative in Congress is the honor of a lifetime. I will return to Washington in coming days to continue our work and begin my treatment plan, which will occur over the next several weeks. I may miss a few votes during this period, but with God’s grace I will be back on the front lines soon. Please keep me in your prayers as I begin this journey,” Lewis said.

2020: John Lewis lends his voice to the calls for justice in the wake of George Floyd’s death

Lewis urged protesters seeking justice in George Floyd’s killing to embrace nonviolence and called on President Donald Trump not to crack down on “orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protests.”

“You cannot stop the call of history,” Lewis said.

Floyd, 46, died in Minneapolis police custody on Memorial Day. The moments leading to his death were captured on camera and spread across social media, igniting a chaotic, historic and emotional few weeks in the U.S.

The video showed Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd to the ground and pressing his knee into his neck as Floyd repeated that he could not breathe. Floyd eventually became unresponsive and was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Protests broke out across the nation and around the world, demanding justice and police reform in the wake of Floyd’s death.

What started off as peaceful demonstrations turned violent in many cities across the U.S., with one of the more notably violent riots breaking out in Lewis’ own city, Atlanta.

“Despite real progress, I can't help but think of young Emmett today as I watch video after video after video of unarmed Black Americans being killed, and falsely accused,” Lewis said in a statement on the protests. “My heart breaks for these men and women, their families, and the country that let them down — again. My fellow Americans, this is a special moment in our history. Just as people of all faiths and no faiths, and all backgrounds, creeds, and colors banded together decades ago to fight for equality and justice in a peaceful, orderly, non-violent fashion, we must do so again.”

“To the rioters here in Atlanta and across the country: I see you, and I hear you,” the statement continued. “I know your pain, your rage, your sense of despair and hopelessness. Justice has, indeed, been denied for far too long. Rioting, looting, and burning is not the way. Organize. Demonstrate. Sit-in. Stand-up. Vote. Be constructive, not destructive. History has proven time and again that non-violent, peaceful protest is the way to achieve the justice and equality that we all deserve.”

In an interview with local media, Lewis quoted Martin Luther King Jr.: “Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. The way of love is a much better way.”

“During the ’60s, the great majority of us accepted the way of peace, the way of love, philosophy and discipline of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living,” he continued. “There’s something cleansing, something wholesome, about being peaceful and orderly.”

“We’re one people, we’re one family,” he said in the interview. “We all live in the same house, not just the American house but the world house.”

Lewis also expressed support for H.R. 7120, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, that passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 236 to 181 on June 25, according to a news release from his office.

“Many may seek to mischaracterize this legislation. Some will ignore the opportunities that this bill presents to improve our communities,” Lewis said in a statement. “For example, I greatly appreciate that the authors included my proposal, the Law Enforcement Inclusion Act, which permits Federal grant funds to be used to recruit and train officers from the neighborhoods they are charged to protect and serve. H.R. 7121 also provides law enforcement with the help and training they need to address mental health, drug use, and other complex societal issues. These proposals are partial solutions to the historic disconnect and distrust between communities of color and law enforcement.”

“Others may argue that the bill does not go far enough,” Lewis continued. “This legislation addresses one Federal part of a complicated puzzle of entrenched, systematic bias and inequality, and we cannot let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Going forward, we must demilitarize law enforcement and establish empathy in our justice system. Make no mistake – much more is needed from cities, counties, State, and Federal authorities in every corner of our country. Our work is cut out for us, and our mandate, from those whom we were elected to represent and serve, is clear.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rep. John Lewis

quotes in a long life of activism

by The Associated Press The Associated Press

Updated July 18, 2020, 7:35 a.m.

Rep. John Lewis spoke to the crowd at the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing reenactment marking 55th anniversary of Selma's Bloody Sunday on March 1, 2020 in Selma, Alabama. | JOE RAEDLE/GETTY

In a long life of activism, Rep. John Lewis never shied away from speaking out. A few quotations:

“To those who have said ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now. The time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. We must say ‘Wake up America! Wake up!’ For we cannot stop and we will not and cannot be patient.”

- During his March on Washington speech in 1963 

 * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“As I was growing up in rural Alabama, I saw all around me the system of segregation and racial discrimination. The visible signs in the little town of Troy, the population of about 7,000, we saw the sign that said ‘colored only.’ White only. Colored waiting. .... In a little 5&10 store was a civil fountain, a clean fountain for white people to come and drink water, but in another corner of the store there was a little spigot, a rusty spigot, (that) said ‘colored drinking.’ And I became resentful of the sign and all the visible evidence of segregation and racial discrimination.”

- Interview conducted for “America, They Loved You Madly,” a precursor to the 1987 documentary “Eyes on the Prize.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“You saw these men putting on their gas masks and behind the state troopers are a group of men, part of the sheriff’s posse, on horses. They came toward us, beating us with nightsticks, trampling us with horses, and releasing their tear gas. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. My legs went from under me. I don’t know how I made it back across the bridge but apparently a group just literally took me back.”

- Recounting the Bloody Sunday confrontation of March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, in an oral history interview conducted by the House historian, Dec. 11, 2014.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Selma is a place where we injected something very meaningful into our democracy. We opened up the political process and made it possible for hundreds and thousands and millions of people to come in and be participants.”

- Oral history interview conducted by the House historian, Dec. 11, 2014.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“When I look out over this diverse crowd and survey the guests on this platform, it seems to realize what Otis Redding sang about and what Martin Luther King, Jr. preached about: this moment in our history has been a long time coming. But a change has come. We are standing here in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln, 150 years after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and only 50 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. We have come a great distance in this country in the 50 years, but we still have a great distance to go before we fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. Sometimes I hear people saying, ‘Nothing has changed.' But for someone who grew up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them, ‘Come and walk in my shoes.‘”

- Speaking during the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“He was my friend. He was my hero. I loved him. He was like a big brother.”

- Reflecting on his relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during interview on Jan. 17, 2015.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“History will not be kind to us. So you have a moral obligation, a mission and a mandate, to speak up, speak out and get in good trouble. You can do it. You must do it. Not just for yourselves but for generations yet unborn.”

- Commencement speech at Lawrence University in 2015

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Our goal was true freedom for every American. Since then, America has made a lot of progress. We are a different society than we were in 1961. And in 2008 we showed the world the true promise of America when we elected President Barack Obama.”

- Campaign speech for Obama in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sept. 6, 2012.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“My dear friends: Your vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.”

- Speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sept. 6, 2012.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“This is unreal. This is unbelievable. Some of you know I grew up in rural Alabama, very, very poor. Very few books in our home. I remember in 1956 when I was 16 years old, some of my brothers and sisters and cousins went down to the public library trying to get library cards and we were told that the library was for whites only and not for coloreds. And to come here and receive this award, this honor. It’s too much. I had a wonderful teacher in elementary school who told me, ‘Read my child, read.' And I tried to read everything. I love books.”

- When accepting an award from the National Book Foundation in 2016

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“The future of our democracy is at stake. There comes a time when you have to be moved by the spirit of history to take action to protect and preserve the integrity of our nation. I believe — I truly believe — the time to begin impeachment proceedings against this president has come. To delay or to do otherwise would betray the foundation of our democracy.”

- Speaking on the House floor in favor of beginning impeachment proceedings against President Trump in September 2019.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

- Remarks atop the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 1, 2020.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Credit...Illustration by Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times;
photograph by Nashville Police Department

John Lewis Risked His Life for Justice

His willingness to do so was essential

to the quest for civil rights.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/opinion/john-lewis.html

by The Editorial Board

July 17, 2020

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Representative John Lewis, who died Friday at age 80, will be remembered as a principal hero of the blood-drenched era not so long ago when Black people in the South were being shot, blown up or driven from their homes for seeking basic human rights. The moral authority Mr. Lewis exercised in the House of Representatives — while representing Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District for more than 30 years — found its headwaters in the aggressive yet self-sacrificial style of protests that he and his compatriots in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee deployed in the early 1960s as part of the campaign that overthrew Southern apartheid.

These young demonstrators chose to underscore the barbaric nature of racism by placing themselves at risk of being shot, gassed or clubbed to death during protests that challenged the Southern practice of shutting Black people out of the polls and “white only” restaurants, and confining them to “colored only” seating on public conveyances. When arrested, S.N.C.C. members sometimes refused bail, dramatizing injustice and withholding financial support from a racist criminal justice system.

This young cohort conspicuously ignored members of the civil rights establishment who urged them to patiently pursue remedies through the courts. Among the out-of-touch elder statesmen was the distinguished civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who was several years away from becoming the nation’s first Black Supreme Court justice when he argued that young activists were wrong to continue the dangerous Freedom Rides of early 1961, in which interracial groups rode buses into the Deep South to test a Supreme Court ruling that had outlawed segregation in interstate transport.

Mr. Marshall condemned the Freedom Rides as a wasted effort that would only get people killed. But in the mind of Mr. Lewis, the depredations that Black Americans were experiencing at the time were too pressing a matter to be left to a slow judicial process and a handful of attorneys in a closed courtroom. By attacking Jim Crow publicly in the heart of the Deep South, the young activists in particular were animating a broad mass movement in a bid to awaken Americans to the inhumanity of Southern apartheid. Mr. Lewis came away from the encounter with Mr. Marshall understanding that the mass revolt brewing in the South was as much a battle against the complacency of the civil rights establishment as against racism itself.

On “Redemptive Suffering”

By his early 20s, Mr. Lewis had embraced a form of nonviolent protest grounded in the principle of “redemptive suffering”— a term he learned from the Rev. James Lawson, who had studied the style of nonviolent resistance that the Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi had put into play during British colonial rule. The principle reminded Mr. Lewis of his religious upbringing and of a prayer his mother had often recited.

In his memoir “Walking With the Wind,” written with Michael D’Orso, Mr. Lewis explained that there was “something in the very essence of anguish that is liberating, cleansing, redemptive,” adding that suffering “touches and changes those around us as well. It opens us and those around us to a force beyond ourselves, a force that is right and moral, the force of righteous truth that is at the basis of human conscience.”

The essence of the nonviolent life, he wrote, is the capacity to forgive — “even as a person is cursing you to your face, even as he is spitting on you, or pushing a lit cigarette into your neck” — and to understand that your attacker is as much a victim as you are. At bottom, this philosophy rested upon the belief that people of good will — “the Beloved Community,” as Mr. Lewis called them — would rouse themselves to combat evil and injustice.

Mr. Lewis carried these beliefs into the Freedom Rides. The travelers described their departing meal at a Chinese restaurant in Washington as “The Last Supper.” Several of the participants had actually written out wills, consistent with the realization that they might never make it home. No one wanted to die, but it was understood that a willingness to do so was essential to the quest for justice.

The Ku Klux Klan did its best to secure such a sacrificial outcome. It firebombed a bus at Anniston, Ala., and tried unsuccessfully to burn the Freedom Riders alive by holding the exit doors shut. “Walking With the Wind” describes the especially harrowing episode that unfolded on the Freedom Ride bus on which he arrived in Montgomery, Ala.

The terminal seemed nearly deserted, he wrote, but “then, out of nowhere, from every direction, came people. White people. Men, women and children. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. Out of alleys, out of side streets, around the corners of office buildings, they emerged from everywhere, from all directions, all at once, as if they’d been let out of a gate. … They carried every makeshift weapon imaginable. Baseball bats, wooden boards, bricks, chains, tire irons, pipes, even garden tools — hoes and rakes. One group had women in front, their faces twisted in anger, screaming, ‘Git them niggers, GIT them niggers!’ … And now they turned to us, this sea of people, more than three hundred of them, shouting and screaming, men swinging fists and weapons, women swinging heavy purses, little children clawing with their fingernails at the faces of anyone they could reach.”

Mr. Lewis’s fellow Freedom Riders tried in vain to escape the mob by scaling trees and terminal walls. “It was madness. It was unbelievable,” Mr. Lewis recalled “… I could see Jim Zwerg now, being horribly beaten. Someone picked up his suitcase, which he had dropped, and swung it full force against his head. Another man then lifted Jim’s head and held it between his knees while others, including women and children, hit and scratched at Jim’s face. His eyes were shut. He was unconscious. … At that instant I felt a thud against my head. I could feel my knees collapse and then nothing. Everything turned white for an instant, then black.”

“Burn Jim Crow to the Ground”

Two years later, in 1963, as Mr. Lewis was about to address the March on Washington, the elder statesmen of the movement prevailed on him to tone down his speech. Thrown out were the harshest criticisms of the John F. Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill as well as a fiery passage threatening that the movement would “march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own scorched earth policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently.”

Yet even the softened speech was radical for the context. At a time when civil rights leaders were commonly referring to African-Americans as Negroes, the Lewis speech used the term Black: “In the Delta of Mississippi, in Southwest Georgia, in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and all over this nation the Black masses are on a march for jobs and freedom.”

To the dismay of many, the 23-year-old Mr. Lewis described the movement as “a revolution,” appealing to all who listened “to get into this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. 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. We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution.”

Mr. Lewis carried his faith in the power of nonviolence into the fateful Selma, Ala., voting rights demonstration — in March of 1965 — that was soon named Bloody Sunday to commemorate the vicious attack that state troopers waged on peaceful marchers. Mr. Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was one of 58 people treated for injuries at a hospital.

The worldwide demonstrations that followed the brutal police killing of George Floyd underscored the extent to which many people need visual evidence to grow outraged over injustice that is perpetrated all the time outside the camera’s eye.

A television broadcast of the violence meted out by the police on Bloody Sunday worked in the same way. It generated national outrage and provided a graphic example of the need for the Voting Rights Act, which was signed into law that summer.

The linchpin part of the law required certain states and parts of states to seek federal permission before changing voting rules. This seemed almost a godsend to the civil rights cohort and at least a partial repayment for the lives of the many men and women who had died in pursuit of voting rights.

Soon after the Supreme Court crippled the act in 2013, states began unveiling measures limiting ballot access. At the time of the decision, Mr. Lewis wrote that the court had “stuck a dagger into the heart” of a hard-won and still necessary law. With his customary eloquence, he urged Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act, describing the right to vote as “almost sacred” and “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy.”

The passing of John Lewis deprives the United States of its foremost warrior in a battle for racial justice that stretches back into the 19th century and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Americans — and particularly his colleagues in Congress — can best honor his memory by picking up where he left off.