John Lewis, Georgia congressman and a Civil Rights Movement leader during the 1960s, addresses a packed audience in Sage Chapel during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration Feb. 3. Below, Lewis speaks with Cornell Daily Sun reporter Nilo F. Alvarado, a freshman English major, in the chapel's choir loft prior to his talk. Photographs by Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography
Georgia congressman and civil rights leader John R. Lewis was just 18 when he first met Martin Luther King Jr. At a Sage Chapel gathering Feb. 3 celebrating King's birthday and life, Lewis related how that initial meeting altered the direction of his life. The chapel was filled to near capacity, and members of the audience were occasionally moved to tears as he recollected his involvement in early civil rights struggles.
An Alabama sharecropper's son, Lewis had written to King asking for his help in gaining admission to a then all-white college in the region where he lived. King wrote back inviting Lewis to come see him in Atlanta. While that college never opened its doors to Lewis, he earned his bachelor's degree from Fisk University and went on to become the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) under King's mentorship, taking part in some of the key civil rights battles of the 1960s.
"For many young people today, the '60s is ancient history," he said. They need to know that "it was a period that changed America forever."
Lewis spoke of the fear that permeated the deep south in the days of racial segregation preceding the Civil Rights Movement and described "tasting the bitter fruits of racism" as a young boy, when he was denied a library card by the only library in the small town where he grew up. "There was a sign at the entrance door that read 'whites only,'" he recalled. He praised King for "helping to bring down that sign" and many others like it, "removing that fear."
Both Lewis and President Hunter Rawlings, who introduced him, spoke of the three young civil rights workers memorialized in a stained-glass window in Sage Chapel. Lewis related how James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered while trying to register black voters in Mississippi in the summer of 1964.
"The young people who died in 1964 didn't just die in Vietnam; they died here," said Lewis. Schwerner had been a Cornell student, Class of '61, and Goodman's parents met and married at Cornell.
Lewis also talked about "growing up by sitting down," describing the sit-ins in which he and others held to the principals of nonviolence and endured humiliation and abuse while waiting to be served at whites-only lunch counters throughout the south. "They would stub out a lighted cigarette in your hair or pour a drink over your head."
Both Lewis and Rawlings also spoke of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., when Lewis and others were brutally beaten by state troopers for marching without a permit. Lewis' skull was cracked in several places, reported Rawlings, and he was jailed "for standing up for what he believed in." That story and others are described in Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, a 1998 book by Lewis that Rawlings called "important" and urged people to read.
Calling for America once and for all to "lay down the burden of race" and build "a truly interracial democracy," Lewis delivered his talk in a deep baritone that resonated throughout Sage and suggested his youthful aspirations of becoming a minister.
He ended his talk by comparing the United States and its racial problems to a "shotgun shack," a house so small and rudimentary that during a thunderstorm its inhabitants must rush from corner to corner, holding the walls down with their own bodies to keep it from blowing away.
"We are of one house, one family," he declared with passion. "The American house, the American family!" As long as racism and bigotry are raging outside, he said, we need our combined strength to hold the walls down.
In a press conference before the talk, Lewis discussed a dialogue on race called "Faith and Politics" that he is engaged in with upstate U.S. Rep. Amory Houghton (R-31st Dist.) and constituents from their two states. Lewis, the Democratic congressman from Georgia's 5th District, said the discussions and visits to civil rights sites came about as a way to follow through on President Clinton's Initiative on Race.
Lewis also said that King's Poor People's Campaign and speech during the Vietnam War, in which he spoke out against "the violence at home as well as abroad," encompassed his most deeply held views better than the often-quoted "I have a dream" speech.
"Dr. King was assassinated for trying to bring about economic justice," a battle that's still being fought today, said Lewis.
Lewis spoke about his own desire to "help create a new movement like the one we created 45 years ago" and his hopes for how Martin Luther King Day might be celebrated: "It should be more than a holiday for mattress sales. As others have said, it should be not a day off but a day on, a day when we go out and teach nonviolence and work toward social justice. Dr. King said, 'We can all be great because we all can serve.' We need to teach even very young children that idea."
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