Following the death of civil rights hero John Lewis, the Georgia Democratic Party on Monday chose state Sen. Nikema Williams, who also serves as the party chair, as the nominee to succeed the congressman.
Georgia's 5th Congressional District, which includes most of Atlanta, backed Hillary Clinton 85-12, so Williams will have no problem winning in the fall. There will also be a special election, which Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has not yet scheduled, for the final months of Lewis’ term.
The party picked a new candidate just three days after Lewis’ death because of fears that, if quick action was not taken, there might not be a Democratic candidate on the November ballot at all. Georgia law required the party to inform the state by Monday afternoon if it would choose a new nominee or leave Lewis' name on the ballot. The law did not explicitly say when the party needed to designate its new candidate at the same time, but Democratic leaders were concerned that if they hesitated, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger could block the eventual choice.
Peach State Democrats allowed candidates to apply for the nomination through Sunday afternoon, and over 130 people turned in questionnaires. A nominating committee, which included prominent Democrats such as 2018 gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, then chose five finalists and submitted them to the party’s executive committee. Ultimately, Williams earned the nomination by winning 37 of 41 votes on the first and only ballot.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein called Williams the frontrunner a day before the vote, citing her “national profile as one of the state’s foremost female Black political leaders.” Following her selection, Bluestein said Williams, who is married to a former Lewis aide, "framed herself as a protégé of the civil rights giant.”
But while Williams will fill Lewis' seat, no one will ever fill his shoes. Lewis was one of the nation's most prominent supporters of voting rights, both during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and during his nearly 34 years in Congress. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer aptly called him “an American Founder” for his role in creating the modern American republic, which was no less than radically transformed by the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. These two landmark pieces of legislation ended the authoritarian one-party oligarchy that existed in the South under Jim Crow and finally established America as a liberal democracy nationwide—almost 200 years after the country's founding.
Lewis was one the leading figures in the civil rights movement for Black Americans from an early age. When he was just 23, he was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his legendary "I Have a Dream" speech. Two years later, he marched for voting rights in Selma, Alabama in 1965. There, law enforcement reacted to the peaceful protest by brutally attacking the marchers and beat Lewis nearly to death, fracturing his skull. But even real and repeatedly threatened violence did not deter his activism.
The events in Selma became known as Bloody Sunday, and TV news audiences around the country were so shocked by images of police brutality against the marchers that it galvanized the ultimately successful effort to pass the Voting Rights Act, which became law on Aug. 6, 1965. Civil rights leaders like Lewis and King deemed the Voting Rights Act the crowning achievement of their movement because it protected the right that helped secure all the others that they were fighting for.
Lewis' career of activism for the cause of civil rights did not end with the 1960s, nor did his role as a protest figure end with his election to Congress in the 1980s: Even in his final decade, he led a sit-in on the House floor to protest the GOP's refusal to pass gun safety measures after a horrific mass shooting in Orlando left 49 dead and 53 wounded in 2016. Lewis would steadfastly make the case that the struggle for civil rights was an unending one, and his leadership inspired countless people who came after him. You can read more about Lewis' lifetime of activism in The New York Times and The Atlanta Constitution.
It also behooves us to take stock of Lewis’ early career in electoral politics, especially his upset win in his 1986 race for the House. Lewis first ran for Congress almost a decade before that famous victory, though, when he entered the 1977 special election for the 5th District to succeed Andrew Young, a civil rights luminary in his own right who had resigned to become Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Lewis, who had the support of his old ally Young, reached an all-Democratic runoff with Wyche Fowler, the white president of Atlanta's City Council, but there he faced a difficult campaign. At the time, white residents in the 5th District outnumbered African Americans 57-43, and while race was not a prominent issue in the campaign, Fowler ended up doing very well in predominantly white areas while Lewis scored big wins with Black voters. Ultimately, Fowler prevailed by a wide 62-38 margin.
Things went far better for Lewis in 1981, though, when he won a citywide seat on the Atlanta City Council by unseating a longtime incumbent 68-32. Lewis got another chance to run for Congress in 1986 when Fowler left to run against Republican Sen. Mack Mattingly (whom he beat), but Lewis once again found himself the underdog against a fellow Democrat.
This time, Lewis’ chief opponent was state Sen. Julian Bond, who was also an old friend of Lewis’ from the civil rights movement. Bond was one of the most prominent state legislators in the whole country and had even hosted an episode “Saturday Night Live” (though he rued one of the jokes he made during a skit).
However, as the AJC’s Jim Galloway explained in a 2015 retrospective after Bond's death, Bond struggled with the perception that he was out of touch with his constituents and not interested in doing his job. In 1984, Bond’s primary opponent had even gone door-to-door playing a recording of the state senator's answering machine tape for voters, which told callers not to leave messages. Bond won renomination that year, but only with 54% of the vote.
Despite that showing, though, Bond very much looked like the man to beat throughout the 1986 campaign. He took 47% of the vote in the first round of the primary—just a few points short of the majority he needed to win outright—while Lewis finished well behind with 35%.
Unlike the contest a decade earlier, 1986's runoff featured two Black men, and in the interim, the district had become majority African American—in part because Bond, from his perch in the legislature, had tweaked the lines in anticipation of his own bid for Congress.
Though Lewis and Bond had once been allies, the faceoff soon became heated. Lewis recounted in his 1988 memoir, “I could not believe he was questioning my integrity, of all things. And he knew, he knew, this was not true.” Lewis also argued that, unlike Bond, he’d work hard for the district, memorably asking voters during one debate, “I want you to think about sending a tugboat and not a showboat.”
The most indelible moment of that campaign also came at a debate, where Lewis alluded to rumors that Bond had used drugs. As Lewis wrote 12 years later:
"Mr. Bond," I said. "My friend. My brother. We were asked to take a drug test not long ago, and five of us went and took that test. Why don't we step out and go to the men's room and take another test?"
The room was dead silent. You could have cut the tension with a knife.
"It seems," I went on, "like you're the one doing the ducking."
Julian was flabbergasted. He gathered himself and responded with a nervous joke about "Star Wars" and "Jar Wars." But no one was laughing.
Ultimately, while Lewis was badly outspent, he pulled off a surprise 52-48 victory. This time, Lewis did very well in predominantly white areas, which Galloway attributed in part to his citywide name recognition from his time on the City Council. The district was about 58% Black by this point, but while Bond won a majority of the Black vote, Lewis performed well among working-class Black voters. A large part of Lewis’ appeal to poorer voters was due to the two candidates’ very different backgrounds: While Bond hailed from a prominent local family, Lewis was the son of a sharecropper.
Lewis had no trouble in the general election that fall, easily defeating a Republican opponent by 50 points, and he never had trouble at the ballot box during the rest of his long career. Lewis and Bond, who went on to become head of the NAACP, later reconciled, and the two went on a high-profile tour of civil rights landmarks months before Bond died in 2015.
Stephen Wolf contributed to this post.