https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-17-2025
"Five years ago tonight, Georgia Representative John Lewis passed away from
pancreatic cancer at the age of 80.
Lewis was a “troublemaker” as a young adult, breaking the laws of his state: he
broke the laws upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration
drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and
black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to
challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I
was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis
later recalled.
An adherent of the philosophy of nonviolence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and
arrested 45 times. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “snick”), he helped to organize the 1963 March
on Washington where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. told more than 200,000
people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. Just
23 years old, Lewis spoke at the event. Two years later, as Lewis and 600
marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray
at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers
charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured
Lewis’s skull.
To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the
lawbreaking protesters who were disrupting the “peace” of the South. But what
seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were, in fact, changing minds.
Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson honored
those changing ideas when he went on TV to support the marchers and call for
Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. On August 6, 1965, Johnson
signed the
Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter
registration in districts where African Americans were historically
underrepresented.
New Black voters helped to elect Lewis to Congress in 1986. He held the seat
from then until his death in 2020, winning reelection 16 times.
Before Representative Lewis died, reporter Jonathan Capehart asked him “what he
would say to people who feel as though they have already been giving it their
all but nothing seems to change.” Lewis answered: “You must be able and
prepared to give until you cannot give any more. We must use our time and our
space on this little planet that we call Earth to make a lasting contribution,
to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than
ever before.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
