A Freedom Rider Finds His Cause

Several times in my early 20s I remember almost dying. One instance occurred while driving down a highway covered in ice, semi-trucks behind me. Another included a drunk man who drew a switchblade on me late at night in North Carolina. But in both these circumstances, I had not placed myself in harm’s way on purpose. Rather, I nearly died by accident—without a cause.

John Lewis, on the other hand, risked his life for a cause. For over six decades—as a civil rights activist, congressman, and best-selling author—he pushed back against social and racial injustices, be it segregation, voting discrimination, and gun violence, to name just a few. Even though he made it to 80 before passing away in December 2020, Lewis, as he’d probably tell you, was fortunate to make it to 21.

When I first cracked open David Greenberg’s John Lewis: A Life, I had one strong concern: Please don’t make him a saint. Past book-length efforts on Lewis, while indeed valuable, wrestled with a clear hagiographic love for the subject, and the last experience I wanted was to read about a man as real as a cloud puff. I’m happy to report that Greenberg’s Lewis is human, fallible, and approachable.

Greenberg weaves a rich 560-page narrative. After what does feel a bit like a genealogical stone-skipping first chapter, Greenberg settles the reader in Nashville, where Lewis, at 17, had moved just far enough away from his family in Troy, Alabama, to forge his own path.

During these formative years, Greenberg wisely places pastor and nonviolence philosopher James Lawson as Lewis’s guiding light. Martin Luther King Jr.’s rhetoric captivated Lewis, but it had been the shocking August 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till that opened his eyes to some of America’s deepest flaws. It was Lawson who taught him how to act.

For Lewis, his education was not so much from his seminary classes but rather in volunteer workshops, where Lawson taught his group the intricacies of Gandhi’s satyagraha, a nonviolent method that requires the participant to relinquish all anger and hold steady to their truth and generate a force from within. Lewis, who dabbled in preaching, felt comfortable with Jesus’ sentiment, in the King James Version, Mark 12:31, "to love thy neighbour as thyself." This, coupled with Gandhi’s tactical resilience, thrust him into the center of the civil rights movement.

First came the Nashville sit-ins, and then the Freedom Rides, which Greenberg brings to life with grit and urgency.

There is an impressive physicality to Greenberg’s prose—an earned ruggedness and tenacity. The stirring passage below documents a moment in Montgomery, Alabama, during the Freedom Rides—May 20, 1961, when Lewis, 21, had just witnessed fellow white activist Jim Zwerg get pummeled by an angry mob (Zwerg survived, barely):

It was now Lewis’s turn. Someone lunged for his briefcase, which he had been gripping the whole time. It was ripped from his fingers. Then he felt a sudden heavy crash against his skull. One of the assailants had smashed him over the head with a wooden Coca-Cola bottle crate. Lewis’s knees buckled. He tottered. He saw nothing but a white field. Thinking he was dying, he wondered if his own final act on earth would be to have witnessed Jim Zwerg’s murder. At least they were dying for a cause, he told himself. Then Lewis, too, was unconscious, blood streaming out of his mouth.

Nearly four years later—140 pages later in Greenberg’s Lewis-verse—on Selma’s "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, Greenberg shows that, when it came to facing death, Lewis had come full circle. After being clubbed across "the left side of his skull—the same spot where he’d been bludgeoned during the Freedom Rides," Lewis again confronted death. "Lewis believed he was going to die, just as he had at the Montgomery bus station in 1961. As before, he realized that he did not fear death. A feeling of peace and serenity—even lucidity—came over him. ‘How odd to die in your own country when you are orderly,’ he remembered thinking, ‘when you are only wanting to bring justice to people. How odd to die while exercising your constitutional rights.’"

Sacrifice. This was John Lewis and many others during the 1960s. But few would survive the spirit of that decade. Either by assassination (Medgar Evers in 1963; Malcolm X in 1965; Dr. King in 1968), or self-imposed exile (Stokely Carmichael to Guinea in ’68; James Baldwin back to France in ’71), the scorching voices of the movement cooled. This I feel is what makes Greenberg’s work so important. Yes, we have John Lewis in all his young, sacrificial glory—his fiery words during the March on Washington, the beating he took crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma—but Greenberg brings into vision Lewis in full, post-Civil Rights Movement. When the protests and demonstrations subsided, who could Lewis, a man whose very oxygen came from his belief in social justice, become?

After Selma, a philosophical redirection began to stir in the movement. In May 1966, during a roller-coaster voting process in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, Lewis was replaced as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee by then-24-year-old firebrand Stokely Carmichael, who believed in pivoting away from nonviolence toward militancy. The vote, thrillingly reported by Greenberg, devastated Lewis. "The pain of that experience," said Lewis in an interview with friend and fellow activist Archie Allen, "is something I will never forget."

After King was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Lewis, still emotionally concussed from the Kingston Springs "revolt," fell into a depression, (Greenberg calls it a "funk") believing that "with a reactionary Congress, and with the assassinations and the riots and the whole bit, the hope now seems shattered, and there seems to be a feeling that the light is going out."

Enter librarian and Peace Corps volunteer Lillian Miles. As Greenberg notes, Lewis was never much focused on romance, putting the cause first. But in a move that stunned his friends and family, Lewis married Lillian—one year older than Lewis—a little over eight months after King’s assassination. King’s father, "Daddy King," presided over the wedding, held, one might guess, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

Though Greenberg allows enough space for readers to make their own connections, it does feel that Lillian gave Lewis the inner strength necessary to pursue new causes. "Where he was sensitive," writes Greenberg, "she was steely; where he indulged in long conversations, she was brisk and businesslike, with one eye on the clock. Her efficiency backstopped John’s easygoing ways." It was Lillian who encouraged Lewis to run for Congress in 1976, and then, a decade later, it was Lillian who kept Lewis moving forward during a harrowing 1986 campaign against longtime friend and activist Julian Bond. Lewis’s narrow victory appears to have severed their friendship, yet Lillian did keep her own friendship with Bond’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Alice.

In the future, Lewis’s years as a civil rights "soldier" will likely be how most first hear about him, but Greenberg’s book brings Lewis’s incredible career and understated humanity into full focus. Details that will stay with me are Lewis calling Lillian at night while on Capitol Hill: "They might talk for hours, even falling asleep while on the phone." The dynamics of their 44-year marriage give the latter half of the book a blast of narrative momentum. Near the end of the book, Greenberg quotes Lewis as saying that Lillian "picked up a country boy, and helped me build an incredible life."

Lewis was often modest to a fault. Let me amend this for him. Lillian picked up a weary soldier and turned him into a wise knight—from a young man driven by the unconditional love known as agape to a gentle giant fueled by the enduring commitment of pragma. Near the end of this roaring, big-hearted book, Greenberg includes a somber moment Lewis shared with a male colleague after Lillian’s passing in December 2012. What Lewis says is a coalescing of these two Greek loves, and it knocked me out.

John Lewis: A Life
by David Greenberg
Simon & Schuster, 704 pp., $35

Patrick Parr is the author of Malcolm Before X and The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.

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