John Lewis has passed the baton of freedom to us
It’s time to cause some trouble.
The man who was nearly beaten to death by a police baton has passed his own baton of freedom to us to continue his work and finish the race.
John Lewis was a terrific trouble maker. That is his greatest legacy.
Lewis died on July 17. He was 80.
He was the last of the Big Six civil rights pillars that held up a vision for a better America and marched on Washington, D.C., for it in 1963.
The Georgia Democrat served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1987. He was called the conscience of Congress, a civil rights icon, an apostle of non-violence who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
Lewis truly was a founding father of this country. He tried to create a more perfect union. He tried to build a better “we the people,” a “we” that included everyone.
And like our Founding Fathers who signed that Declaration of Independence mutually pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, Lewis put all three on the line.
He was arrested more than 40 times in the fight for freedom. He was bloodied and beaten by law enforcement officers and by angry white people. They spit on him, beat him, even burned him with cigarettes.
Lewis nearly gave his life in the fight for freedom when a state trooper fractured his skull, cracking it with a billy club as Lewis walked with 600 protesters in a peaceful march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on a day forever known as “Bloody Sunday,” which is March 7, 1965.
The nonviolent protesters were met by tear gas, bull whips and clubs.
Lewis described it this way: “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.”
Lewis wrote, “The sight of them rolling over us like human tanks was something that had never been seen before. People just couldn’t believe this was happening in America.”
We still can’t believe what is happening in America. We all saw a Minneapolis police officer squeeze the life out of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man who was begging for his life.
The global response to that public murder gave Lewis hope: “It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets – to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call ‘good trouble.’”
I love those words, good trouble.
He was heartened by the Black Lives Matter movement and momentum. “It is so much more massive and all inclusive,” he said. “There will be no turning back.”
No, it’s forward, march, right across that John Lewis Bridge to freedom.
Yes, it’s time to name that bridge in Selma after the man who nearly died there. Right now, it’s named for Edmund Pettus, head of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
It’s time to march across that bridge to freedom, to become conscious and active in the fight against racism, within us and around us, in the very structures that hold up America as we know it, from the police and prison system to the voting rights atrocities committed by politicians who lie about making America great while stealing its soul.
It’s time to pass and restore the Voting Rights Act, which is stuck in the Senate. Lewis called voting “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have to create a more perfect union.”
Somehow, he never gave up hope, as he wrote on Twitter in 2018:
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime.”
His lifetime struggle is over.
It started as a boy, when he asked his parents why he didn’t have the same rights as white people. They told him, “That’s the way it is. Don’t get in the way. Don’t get in trouble.”
Lewis made it his life mission to get in the way, to get in trouble.
It’s our mission now.
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble and help redeem the soul of America,” he told us in March on that bridge that should bear his name.
It’s time we all get into good trouble.
The kind that will redeem the soul of America.