What is his legacy?
At college in the late '50s, Lewis became a serious student of non-violence. In 1960, he launched successful sit-ins to desegregate Nashville's downtown lunch counters. In 1961, he was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, refusing to sit in the back of buses as they rode from Washington DC to New Orleans. In the course of those rides, he was beaten in South Carolina and Birmingham, left unconscious from a beating at a bus station in Montgomery, and regularly arrested.
In Mississippl, he spent forty days in that state's Sunflower County penitentiary.
In 1963, at the age of 23 and as head of the nationwide Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was the youngest speaker to address the crowd of a quarter million from the Lincoln Memorial, demanding voting rights at the celebrated March on Washington. In 1965, on Bloody Sunday, he was planning to walk from Selma to Montgomery in support of those same rights and expected to be arrested.
Instead, he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge right into the skull fracturing baton of an Alabama state trooper.
And wound up in the hospital.
In the 1970s, he ran the Voter Education Project, adding four million minority voters to the rolls. In 1981, he became a member of the Atlanta City Council, and in 1986 he was elected to Congress. Until his death earlier this month, he served there for thirty-three years. He was regularly returned to his seat in the House by two-thirds of his constituents.
At yesterday's funeral, three former Presidents -- George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- eulogized him.
In those eulogies, they recounted the emergence of a poor sharecropper's son from Troy, Alabama. Preaching to his chickens, running for the school bus, becoming an ordained Baptist minister, and so ignited by Dr. King's Biblical call to non-violence and justice that he made it his life's work.
"It is a great honor to be back at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," said Barack Obama, "to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple."
"He insist[ed]," said George W. Bush, "that hate and fear had to be answered with love and hope." He was so insistent, said Bill Clinton, that in 1966 he lost the leadership of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael, refusing to believe that aggression and exclusion would be more effective than Dr. King's non-violent universality. "[I]t must have been painful to lose," said Clinton, "but he showed as a young man there are some things you cannot do to hang on to a position, because if you do them, you won't be who you are anymore."
John Lewis never stopped being who he was.
In his eighty years, he fought discrimination in all forms . . . in all forums . . . against anyone . . . and at any time.
Even as an old man . . .
When he sat all night on the floor of the House of Representatives demanding a vote on legislation to end gun violence.
Even as a dying man . . .
When he stood on that street in DC on which Black Lives Matter had been written, the street where protesters of all colors daily gathered in the wake of the death of George Floyd , the one from which US soldiers were illegally ordered to remove them.
What is his legacy?
It is, as Bill Clinton put it, "to suit up and march on."
"Bull Connor may be gone," said Barack Obama, "But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone. But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators."
"We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot," he continued, "[b]ut even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darndest to discourage people from voting -- by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrtrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don't get sick."
There's a lot to do.
"The story that began in Troy," said President Bush, "isn't ending today, nor is the work."
On the morning of the funeral, aware of the praise that would come Lewis's way and therefore more or less on (psychological) cue, Donald Trump raised the possibility of delaying this November's election. The ostensible purpose, according to Trump, would be to avoid mail-in ballot fraud, a fear he and Attorney General Barr have repeatedly stoked of late but one that lacks any basis in fact.
Almost immediately, Trump's latest trip to the altar of anti-democratic authoritarianism was rejected en masse.
Democrats were predictably aghast but even stalwart right wingers thought this a bridge too far. Prof. Steven Calabresi, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society, called the suggestion "fascistic", and historian Michael Beschloss noted that during the Civil War President Lincoln had categorically rejected it. Closer to home, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it wouldn't happen, and legal experts far and wide asserted that it couldn't anyway, the November 3 election date having been set by statute and unchangeable absent a new one.
But is it?
There have been numerous reports over the last two years of unknown emergency powers available to the president. Last week, former Sen. Gary Hart penned an op-ed in The New York Times. "We have recently come to learn," he wrote, "of at least a hundred documents authorizing extraordinary presidential powers in the case of a national emergency, virtually dictatorial powers without congressional or judicial checks and balances." No one, according to Hart, knows what these powers are or what specifically they permit, and delaying or otherwise avoiding elections may easily be one of them.
For any who think Hart another Democratic Cassandra, he served on the Church Committee that investigated and laid bare the abuses of the CIA in the 1970s. He also co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission that predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
We ignore him at out peril.
And though, as President Clinton noted yesterday, "there are some things" his deceased hero would not do "to hang on to a position", the same cannot be said of Donald Trump.
So . . .
What would John Lewis do?
I don't know precisely.
But what he would not do is sit idly by assuming the worst was not possible or the best was likely. He would not assume that past is necessarily prologue. "We cannot treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time," said Barack Obama yesterday, "We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy."
At the funeral yesterday, the strains of "We Shall Overcome", that ancient anthem of hope, reverberated through Dr. King's church. It was sung to celebrate a man who was beaten within inches of his life because he insisted that all Americans had the right to vote.
Thanks to him, and others like him, we do.
We all do.
We still do.
And Trump better not fuck with it.
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