[Each year for
Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I share a special post on better remembering the
many layers of one of our most important and inspiring figures and voices. This
week I’ve followed it up with a series AmericanStudying some of King’s
colleagues in the Civil Rights Movement. Add your thoughts on King, the
movement, or any related histories and issues for a crowd-sourced civil rights
post, please!]
On three moments
that together reflect the presence and role of a living legend.
1)
The Bridge: As the
film Selma (and the wonderful
performance by young
actor Stephan James) potently illustrates, young John Lewis, one of the
leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, played an
instrumental role in the voting rights protests and marches linked to that
city and its Edmund Pettis Bridge. Lewis was of course far from the only young
participant in those efforts, and he
would be the first to remind us of the contributions of so many others; but
what he perfectly provides (as, again, the film portayed) is a symbolic
representation of all those young Civil Rights activists—their inspiration they
took from more senior leaders, the impacts they themselves made on the
movement, and, perhaps most significantly, the way they carried those efforts
forward into the decades that followed.
2)
The Attack: Lewis hasn’t just been a social and
political activist for all those subsequent decades, however; he has also,
mostly for good but occasionally in troubling ways, been used as a continued
symbol of African American triumphs and struggles. Perhaps the clearest example
of a troubling moment was on the day when the Affordable Care Act (or
Obamacare, as it’s generally known) was to be voted into law by Congress; as Congressman
Lewis walked to the Capitol Building to cast his vote for the bill, he and
other African American colleagues were (allegedly, but the incident was caught on
tape and seems clear enough) verbally attacked
by a number of Tea Party protesters and spit upon by one of them. While the
attack was of course inextricably tied to the climate of extremism that the Tea
Party and others had whipped up around the bill, I would argue that it’s just
as clear that Lewis was individually targeted in direct relation to the racial identity he
shares with President Obama; as, that is, a symbol for racist protesters
threatened by these African American figures and leaders. That’s one of the
most frustrating but undeniable aftermaths of the Civil Rights Movement, and
one succinctly symbolized by this attack on Lewis.
3)
The Convention: Yet if Lewis (like all of us,
and especially like all public figures) has been at times defined by others in
ways outside of his control, he has also continued to tell his own story in
unique and inspiring ways. Perhaps the most unique is March, a trilogy of graphic novels about
his life and Civil Rights efforts that Lewis
co-wrote with Andrew Aydin and illustrator Nate Powell; book one was
published in August 2013, and book two in January 2015. In support of that latter
publication and to help spread the word about the graphic novel to a new
generation, Lewis
attended the 2015 Comic Con, perhaps the most famous pop culture convention
in the world. The image
of Lewis surrounded by excited young fans, looking for all the world like
an aging but still vibrant superhero (which, of course, he is), is one of my
favorites of the last few years—and reflects just how much this Civil Rights
legend still has to contribute to our communal conversations and identity.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other Civil Rights figures, histories or responses
you’d share?
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