People come up to John Lewis to remember.
They tell him about being a Freedom Rider, in the early 1960s demonstrations when the future congressman was beaten bloody in South Carolina and Alabama for sitting together with white people on interstate buses.
People come up to recall seeing Lewis as the youngest – and now the only surviving – major figure on the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963, and remember Lewis getting his skull split open on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, in the protest that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
When your life is history, people come up to you to remember.
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., was in Portland last weekend, to mark Martin Luther King weekend at Congregation Beth Israel and to talk about the first volume of “March,” his graphic novel memoir of the civil rights movement, at Powell’s. He appeared at a moment when King’s position in history is secure, but the legacy of the bridge now seems uncertain.
King, recalled Lewis, “is much more revered today than in earlier years.” In an interview before his speech at Beth Israel, he noted, “so many students are studying the civil rights movement.”
To the congregation, he recalled that as a 15-year-old in Alabama, “When I heard what Dr. King was doing, he seemed to be speaking directly to me.” Lewis went to the Pike County Library to apply for a library card, to be told that the library served only white people.
He didn’t return to the library for decades, until he went back to do a book-signing.
It was a warmer response than he got last June, when the Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, threw out a key part of the Voting Rights Act, requiring states and localities with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting laws or election procedures. The court majority said the law didn’t reflect the progress that had been made; in the months since, multiple states, mostly Southern, have passed new laws generally limiting voting rights and opportunities.
“When the Supreme Court decision came down in June, I said it was a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” remembered Lewis. “I had a sense of disbelief. I felt like crying.”
He was particularly upset by a justice referring to voting rights as an “entitlement.” Voting, he thinks, is not to be compared with safety net programs. “The right to vote is precious,” Lewis told the audience Friday night. “It’s almost sacred.”
Especially for people who remember how it was secured.
“That’s why I took the Supreme Court decision so hard,” he explained softly. “Some of us gave blood on that bridge for the right to vote.”
The day before, several congressmen and senators offered a bill to reinstate some of
the provisions the Supreme Court threw out. Lewis supports it, with no expectation that it’s going to be easy this time around, in a congressional environment so much more polarized and partisan than the one he dealt with in the 1960s.
“In my office in Washington, there’s a picture of me in 1963 meeting with the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership. Without the Republican leadership and the Democratic leadership, the legislation wouldn’t have happened. Now, it’s a completely different mindset.”
The bill is supported by several Republicans, including Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who largely wrote the renewal of the Voting Rights Act that overwhelmingly passed both houses in 2006. After attending the annual congressional road trip to Selma that Lewis led last March, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said he would support a fix
Monday, in the congressional newspaper The Hill, Cantor said he didn’t know what he’d do on the bill.
With virtually all the other civil rights leaders from the ‘60s long gone, it’s striking to see John Lewis still in the fight, until you remember just how young he was then – 23 at the March on Washington, 25 on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
“It’s a good feeling to know that I’m still here, in spite of it all,” he says. “I almost died on that bridge, and I’m still here.”
Over time, everybody passes into history. Even for the most vivid moments, memories fade.
And we’re still a ways from the other end of that bridge.
David Sarasohn’s columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays. He can be reached at email@example.com