John Lewis and the will to move the world

After Congressman John Lewis died, the tributes came rolling in. They continue to roll in. Lewis, who died at 80, was a civil rights activist as a young man - while Dwight Eisenhower was president, before most Americans were born — and a voice for civil rights during his 33 years representing Georgia’s 5th Congressional district.

Lewis told the story of how the boy John Lewis became the man John Lewis in books and interviews. The sharecropper’s son from Troy, Alabama, born into segregation, who refused to accept the world as he found it. But there was always a mystery to his story. Lewis was born in 1940, as were thousands of other African Americans, some of them into more impoverished, repressive circumstances. Many if not most of his peers bowed to the world as they found it, just as their parents had. John Lewis refused.

Why not?

Lewis said that as a small boy who could read, under age 10, he began asking his parents about the signs he saw all over his community. Signs taking various forms that said whites only, colored only. They were in every public place. Little John asked why the signs were there — he wanted an explanation of whites only, colored only. What he got from his parents, in his telling, was “That’s the way it is, and keep quiet or you will get into trouble.” In an essay published after he died, Lewis wrote “In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.”

Young Lewis told himself not only were the signs an expression of injustice, the world that posted them was unjust. He decided to change the world.

Now if John Lewis was something of a prodigy, he was still a boy. A musical prodigy can appear on stage at age 10 to the enthusiastic applause of large audiences. Mozart did. If young Mozart and his piano had been placed behind a screen to play for an overflowing ballroom, nobody would have known the sophisticated performance was that of a child. But words are the medium of political performers, especially the spoken word. No audience was going to mistake the voice of little John Lewis for that of a man. John Lewis had to wait. He waited until he became a teenager when he was more physically and mentally developed. Then he participated in sit-ins, protests, freedom rides, marches and other forms of peaceful demonstration and became adept as a speaker. He eventually joined Rev. Martin Luther King, as one of his young lieutenants. Dr. King called him, affectionately, “the boy from Troy.”

In 1762, The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.” This is one of the most revolutionary sentences in human history, having inspired protests against princesses, potentates, kings, churches and yes, even democracies, for almost 250 years. Rousseau, like John Lewis, saw the world as it was and said “I will change it,” but Rousseau’s weapon was words, not deeds. “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains” could have been said at any time in human history, but if it was said earlier, it wasn’t said to an emerging bourgeois audience receptive to challenging injustice.

During World War II, the Germans conquered France. Part of France was occupied by German troops, part was administered by French collaborators. There also were those who fought back — the self-styled Resistance. The collaborators are easy enough to explain. They were motivated by “What’s in it for me?” Personal benefit in one form or another — a better job, more material goods in years of shortage, titles and status. Those who joined the Resistance are harder to fathom. Yes, patriotism was important — love of country. But the Resistance was a high-risk endeavor. Members were captured, members were shot — some after they were betrayed by their fellow Frenchmen.

Georges Bidault, who played major governmental roles in post-war France, was asked to explain why people resisted. He said some people are resisters by nature, some people are not. This lamely suggests resisters are born. But academic explanations provided by intellectuals, which typically focus on economic status, marital status, geographic location, professional and civic affiliations, are unsatisfactory as well. People whose economic and social profiles were exactly the same in 1940 took divergent paths.

The civil right movement John Lewis joined was small. It eventually became a mass movement, but a mass movement in which a relatively few people took the major risks. The risks, as in Vichy France, included nights in jail, threats of violence, and even death. Martin Luther King himself was murdered.

Most of us are not resisters. We adapt, we make the best we can of the world. The world molds us; we don't mold the world.

We admire, even revere John Lewis, for many reasons. One of them is because he had the courage to take action in the name of justice, fairness, decency and yes, love. Our dreams are far more pedestrian — not ignoble, but pedestrian. We are not unimaginative, but we lack John Lewis’ imagination, an imagination that led him to refuse to accept the world he collided with as “the boy from Troy.”

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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