John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and was an important leader in the American Civil Rights Movement as president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He has represented the 5th District of Georgia (map) in the United States House of Representatives since 1987. The district takes in almost all of Atlanta.
Born in Troy, Alabama, the son of sharecroppers, Lewis was educated at the American Baptist Theological Seminary and at Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became active in the local sit-in movement, within time he joined such other events like the Freedom Rides, he went on to become an important national leader in the civil rights struggle. Lewis became nationally known after his prominent role on the Selma to Montgomery marches, when police beat the nonviolently marching Lewis mercilessly in public, leaving head wounds that are still visible today.
Of John Lewis, the historian Howard Zinn wrote: "At the great Washington March of 1963, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), John Lewis, speaking to the same enormous crowd that heard Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream,' was prepared to ask the right question: 'Which side is the federal government on?' That sentence was eliminated from his speech by organizers of the March to avoid offending the Kennedy Administration. But Lewis and his fellow SNCC workers had experienced, again and again, the strange passivity of the national government in the face of Southern violence, strange, considering how often this same government had been willing to intervene outside the country, often with overwhelming force. [1]
"John Lewis and SNCC had reason to be angry. John had been beaten bloody by a white mob in Montgomery as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but done nothing itself except to have FBI agents take notes. Instead of insisting that blacks and whites had a right to ride the buses together, the Kennedy Administration called for a 'cooling-off period,' a moratorium on Freedom Rides. [2]
"The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events --some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled." [3]
After leaving SNCC in 1966, he worked with community organizations and was then named community affairs director for the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta.
Lewis first ran for elective office in 1977 when a vacancy occurred in Georgia's 5th District. A special election was called after President Jimmy Carter appointed then Rep. Andrew Young, D-Atlanta, to be ambassador to the United Nations. Lewis lost the race to Wyche Fowler, then a member of the Atlanta City Council. In 1981, Lewis was himself elected to the Atlanta City Council.
In 1986, Fowler ran successfully for the United States Senate. Lewis defeated Julian Bond, also a national Civil Rights leader, in the Democratic primary to succeed Fowler. Winning the primary was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic 5th District. While Bond had been the first African-American to represent Georgia in either house of Congress since Reconstruction, Lewis is the second. Lewis has been re-elected nine times without serious opposition, often with over 70 percent of the vote. He has been unopposed for reelection since 2002.
Since 1991, Lewis has been senior chief deputy whip in the Democratic caucus. He is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc..
Lewis is, according to the Associated Press, "the first major House figure to suggest impeaching George W. Bush," arguing that the president "deliberately, systematically violated the law" in authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct wiretaps without a warrant. Lewis said: "He is not King, he is president."[4]
Autobiography
- Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis with Michael D'Orso, 1999. This is an important memoir of the Civil Rights movement.
External links
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