“Never Become Bitter”: Remembering Representative John Lewis
“There may be setbacks and disappointments, but I believe we are on our way to a better place.” —John Lewis, foreword, Barack Obama: The Official Inaugural Book, 2009
Representative John Lewis (1940–2020) is being widely remembered and mourned today. My voice is by far not the most prestigious one in that chorus, nor will it be the most eloquent. But I can’t let this day pass without paying my respects to someone I have so long and so deeply respected.
John Lewis organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. He was a Freedom Rider, putting himself at risk to challenge segregation in bus terminals across the South. He chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and spoke, at only 23 years old, at the March on Washington in 1963. On “Bloody Sunday” in 1965, he and 600 other peaceful protesters were attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama — which helped galvanize passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Between 1960 and 1966, he was arrested 40 times.
In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council, and he served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years, from 1986 until his death yesterday. In the 2010s, he worked with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell to turn his civil rights journey into a trilogy of graphic novels called March, reaching a new audience in a new way with an old message. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011.
For any human being, just one of these accomplishments over the course of a lifetime would bring distinction. For all of them to belong to one man is nearly unimaginable. And that this man lived through this tumultuous history and never became jaded, or hopeless, or bitter — that is what I admire most about Representative Lewis.
It’s so hard now in America to see how we get past our divisions. At the same time when George Floyd’s death has sparked tens of thousands of people to take to the streets, looking to change the systemic mistreatment of African Americans in our country, many others double down on dangerous and hateful rhetoric. Even today, I have seen people disparaging the legacy of John Lewis on respectful social media posts about his passing. When did Americans become a people who seek to politicize and disparage the dead, particularly a civil rights icon?
I often despair for our future. I recently wrote about the unfinished state of our country in living up to her ideals, and how uncomfortable a place that is for any of us to be. I think many cannot take that discomfort head-on, and so they turn their backs, or even worse, deny that there is a problem. When I start to lose faith in our ability to make permanent, lasting change, John Lewis has always been one of the people I could turn to for a bit of hope. He never lost faith, he never lost hope, and in his steadfastness, he was an anchor for all of us.
Just weeks after President Trump was elected in 2016, John Lewis spoke in Nashville, where nearly a half-century earlier, he’d organized lunch counter sit-ins. I was struck by his words to those involved in protests against the newly elected president:
“I would say to the young people, the young protesters, and those not so young: Accept a way of peace, believe in the way of love, believe in the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence.”
“Never become bitter. Never become angry. And do whatever you can to speak truth to power, and be hopeful, be optimistic.
“The struggle is not a struggle that lasts one day or a few weeks or a few years. It is a struggle of a lifetime.”
But this call to hope was a consistent message for Lewis. When he spoke with co-author Andrew Aydin on their graphic novel trilogy March at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in 2014, Lewis said:
“March is saying, in effect, that there come a time, yes, to find a way to get into good trouble, necessary trouble, but it’s also saying that we can create a community at peace with itself.”
In November 2016, John Lewis talked to Jon Batiste of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and Batiste asked Lewis for any words of wisdom he could provide “after so many years of facing hate and facing violence.” Lewis responded:
“Well, sometimes, … someone says something hostile to me, you say you don’t believe that, you really don’t believe that, your mother didn’t teach you that.”
Lewis went on in that conversation to cite Martin Luther King’s words that hate is too heavy a burden to bear, and to add his own mantra that “love is a better way.”
I marvel at Lewis’s ability to keep a cool head and consistently turn the other cheek to those who sought to deny even his basic humanity — and not only that, but to hold onto hope that things will change. And for those of us — almost all of us — who are not as strong as he, it’s easy, despite his urging, to give into despair over the loss of this bold and strong but compassionate and empathetic man. I am feeling that right now. So in addition to Representative Lewis’s own words, I will turn to the words of President Barack Obama for comfort:
In so many ways, John’s life was exceptional. But he never believed that what he did was more than any citizen of this country might do. He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage, a longing to do what’s right, a willingness to love all people, and to extend to them their God-given rights to dignity and respect. And it’s because he saw the best in all of us that he will continue, even in his passing, to serve as a beacon in that long journey towards a more perfect union.
John Lewis thought any of us could be as great as him, and as passionate in working for just change. The best way we can honor his legacy is to live up to even a fraction of those expectations, and all seek out some good trouble.
