was written by David Remnick in The New Yorker. It is titled John Lewis, Donald Trump, and the Meaning of Legitimacy, and was occasioned by what happened over the weekend starting with Rep. Lewis’s remarks on Meet the Press and the furious response from the man who will take the oath of office in less than 72 hours, and from some of his henchmen.
The piece opens with this paragraph:
John Lewis represents Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, one vote of four hundred and thirty-five. He is also the singular conscience of Capitol Hill. Lewis is a dismal institution’s griot, a historical actor and hero capable of telling the most complex and painful of American stories—the story of race. That is his job, his mission. With Dr. King and Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker long gone, Lewis remains nearly alone in his capacity to tell the story of that era as a direct witness and, because of all that he has seen and endured, to issue credible moral judgment.
Those words should clearly establish the seriousness with which Remnick approached writing this piece.
One key paragraph is the description of what happened to Lewis after crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge on “Bloody Sunda” and the aftermath. Even if you have seen film of the actual confrontation, you may not know all of what is in these words:
Given one minute to disperse by the troopers, Lewis had the protesters kneel in prayer. They would not leave. “And then they were upon us.” The troopers charged, and the first among them brought down a nightstick on the left side of Lewis’s skull. His legs gave way. “I really thought I was going to die,” he said. He curled up on the ground, as he had been trained, in a “prayer for protection” position.” The trooper hit him again. And then came the canisters of tear gas. His skull fractured, his coat a mess of mud and blood, Lewis refused to go to the hospital. Barely conscious, he reached Brown Chapel, the headquarters of the movement, ascended to the pulpit, and told those gathered, many of them still gasping from the tear gas, “I don’t know how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam. I don’t see how he can send troops to the Congo. I don’t see how he can send troops to Africa, and he can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama. Next time we march, we may have to keep going when we get to Montgomery. We may have to go on to Washington.”
Note that John Lewis ignored the risk to himself after his injury to speak out, to focus those who had participated and who had learned — in horror — of what had happened, to make sure people were mindful that their work was far from done.
That event led Lyndon Johnson to move aggressively for the Voting Rights Act that has been hollowed out by the Roberts Court, a hollowing out without which it is quite conceivable that the recent election would have had different results at both the Presidential and Senatorial levels. Remember, there were jurisdictions in the North that were covered by pre-Clearance: there were jurisidictions in Michigan that were covered, as well as substantial parts of North Carolina and Florida.
You should read the whole piece. I will close with one more paragraph from Remnick, the final one, because its second half speaks very powerfully to what the real issue is:
Trump avoided the draft by citing bone spurs in his feet. He has said he has made “a lot of sacrifices” for his country because he has created jobs and “built great structures.” The sacrifices that Lewis has made for his country and for the cause of justice are manifest in the scars on his skull. It is a safe bet that he will not be wounded by any tweet. And there are those who know well what he has done to advance the cause of justice and human rights. Eight years ago, at a lunch following the inaugural ceremonies, the new President signed a piece of paper for him with the inscription “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.” John Lewis surely believes in the orderly transfer of power as a tenet of democracy, but asking him to keep quiet and sit through the inaugural ceremonies this time is asking too much.
It is quite true that absent the Voting Rights Act it is inconceivable that the 44th President of the United States would have been a man of color, just as it is inconceivable that over 10% of the new House of Representatives is part of the Congressional Black Caucus.
To get to that took people willing to die, as Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman did, and as John Lewis almost did.
But Lewis had a record of putting himself on the line physically long before Selma: after all, he was also a Freedom Rider.
You can take Donald Trump and his lackeys like Dinesh D’Souza and Roger Stone and Kelly Anne Conway together and they will still lack one percent of the moral rectitude and courage and willingness to sacrifice on behalf of others that John Lewis has demonstrated, time and again.
It is a safe bet he will not be wounded by any tweet. Indeed, and the tweets of the man in the eponymous tower have made clear how small man he is in comparison to the moral giant John Lewis.
Read Remnick’s piece.