I've been reading around on the Internet about John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Georgia Democrat who died yesterday at his home in Atlanta. Here's the section on his "early life" from the Wikipedia article:
John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae (née Carter) and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama.
As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people; by the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. As he grew older, though, he began taking trips into town with his family, where he experienced racism and segregation, such as at the public library in Troy. However, Lewis had relatives who lived in northern cities, and learned from them that the North had integrated schools, buses, and businesses. When Lewis was eleven, one of his uncles took him on a trip to Buffalo, New York, and, afterwards, he was even more acutely aware of Troy's segregation.
In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King, Jr. on the radio, and, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott (led by King) began later that year, Lewis closely followed the news about it. Lewis would later meet Rosa Parks when he was 17, and met King for the first time when he was 18.
The top of the article includes a note stating that, as its subject recently died, extensive revisions are in progress. That might account for why, when I read the article last night, it said that Lewis had never seen a white person till he was 6. My first thought was that seems almost unbelievable. My second thought was that my dad, born 7 years before Lewis in rural Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, had almost certainly never seen a black person when he was 6. If not for my attendance at a Twins baseball game as a kindergartner, I might not have, either.
It's not taken up in any of the early obituaries and tributes I've seen, but the details of Lewis's early rise within the civil rights movement must be a good story. What did his parents Willie and Eddie, the sharecroppers in rural Alabama, think when their son, age 23, stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the assembled thousands a few minutes before Martin Luther King delivered his most famous speech? Later that day, Lewis shook President Kennedy's hand in the Oval Office. The historian Michael Beschloss, speaking about Lewis on the television this morning, explained that Kennedy was nervous about the March on Washington. He had prevailed, barely, over Richard Nixon in the presidential election of 1960—the popular vote had been essentially a tie, 49.72 to 49.55 percent, and the states Kennedy won had included North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. These states had been voting Democratic since the Civil War, on account of Lincoln having been a Republican. Kennedy wasn't eager to lose their support, and according to Beschloss, the White House welcome that day for King, Lewis, and the other civil rights leaders was "tepid." Kennedy had gone so far as to have someone in his Administration at the ready to drown out the words of any speech that got too radical—the method was to have been a Mahalia Jackson recording blared across the National Mall. The next year, 1964, Kennedy was dead and President Johnson is said to have muttered, as he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, "There goes the South." If he said it, he was right. Nixon won the presidency in 1968. The popular vote was again evenly divided, but the Democrat, Hubert Humphrey, was almost shut out in the South: Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, and both Carolinas; except for Texas, Johnson's home state, the rest of the old Confederacy gave its electoral votes to 3rd-party candidate George Wallace, the governor of John Lewis's home state who was most famous for having declared, in an inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
Nevertheless when Wallace died in 1998 Lewis, by then a congressman from Georgia, eulogized him on the editorial page of the New York Times. The Times ran Lewis's article beneath the headline, "Forgiving George Wallace." The piece is notable for its tone of possibly strained respect and for what Lewis leaves out. "But the George Wallace who sent troops to intimidate peaceful, orderly marchers in Selma in 1965 was not the same man who died this week," he writes—eliding the fact that Wallace's troops had done more than just "intimidate" the marchers. Lewis himself was one of fifty-eight marchers beaten so severely as to require treatment at a local hospital, in his case for a fractured skull. In the below picture, he's kneeling in the foreground, holding the back of his head with his right hand.
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