March: Books 2 & 3

The first great triumph of the civil rights movement was in making itself a national story. Local challenges to segregation had no chance of succeeding unless they gained nationwide attention and, with that attention, a demand for public action. After decades of challenges against segregation, the movement took off when Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. became household names across America during the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet gaining the nation’s attention was not always sufficient. The nation watched Bull Connor unleash firehoses and dogs on children in 1963, yet by 1965, practically no progress had been made in advancing Black suffrage in Alabama. The efforts of the MFDP captured the attention of the entire Democratic party, but the organization still failed to remove the mainstream, segregated party by the 1964 convention.

Demoralized and pondering his next steps following the convention, John Lewis found his way forward during his travels in Africa. While traveling with the singer and activist Harry Belafonte, Lewis came to appreciate that internationalizing the struggle was just as important as nationalizing it. All over the world, Black and brown people were throwing off the shackles of colonial rule and building their own societies. In Senegal, Lewis was shocked to see Black pilots and police officers enjoying the everyday dignity afforded any respected profession, and he realized that the United States could learn a great deal from Africa. Lewis was also surprised to find young African activists principally concerned with Malcolm X rather than with Martin Luther King. Lewis had earlier commented, “I never felt like he [Malcom X] was a part of the movement” (Book 2, Page 149), as Malcolm saw little use in gaining the attention of a white audience or government that he believed would never accept Black people as equals.

In Africa, Lewis learned how Malcolm had instead appealed to an international audience and now was seeking a United Nations resolution denouncing the United States for failing to protect its Black citizens. Making arguments that heavily influenced later activists such as the Black Panther Party, Malcolm explicitly connected the anti-imperial struggle with the efforts among Black Americans to form their own “nation,” if not literally then at least in terms of having control over their own destiny. In their accidental meeting in Kenya, Malcolm taught Lewis to make the civil rights movement part of a global fight for freedom, one that integrated issues of class as well as race. This approach would later have an influence on King, who in the last year of his life connected America’s domestic mistreatment of its Black citizens with a foreign policy, particularly exercised in Vietnam, that sought to suppress fights for independence.

Lewis applied the lessons he learned from Malcolm in his climactic campaign in Selma, the signature moment of his civil rights career. Selma represents the convergence of local, national, and international considerations. As an Alabamian, Lewis professed a “deep kinship” (185) with the state’s people, and his extensive work in Selma had made the challenges remaining there unfinished business for him. A showdown between Martin Luther King and George Wallace would compel the nation’s attention and hopefully push the Johnson administration toward the passage of a voting rights act. When Lewis and his fellow protesters endured the untrammeled fury of the police, who beat them as they knelt, Selma then became an international problem as well.

In this moment, Lewis’s commitment to Nonviolence as a Way of Life intersects again with his vision of The Civil Rights Movement as a Revolution. The entire world saw the United States, which presents itself as a bastion of democracy, responding to peaceful protest in a manner more becoming of an authoritarian state. Still woozy and bloody from the beating he endured, Lewis states, “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 we can send troops to Africa, and he can’t send troops to Selma, Alabama” (207). In short, the US government had no problem deploying its immense military might on behalf of its national interests, but those interests apparently did not extend to protecting its own citizens against wanton violence. If the United States was to have any chance of leading the “free world,” it could not go on denying basic freedoms to millions of its own people.

The eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provides a fitting end to the book, as for Lewis, this moment marks “the last day of the movement as I knew it” (243). Lewis does not mean that the struggle for civil rights is over, only that at this point, the struggle enters into a new phase. Earning the right to vote did not grant Black citizens full equality, as the legacy of slavery, segregation, and other forms of discrimination still permeated American society. However, it did give Black Americans the political power to wage the struggle for equality within the parameters of the law. It is fitting that Lewis shifted from activism to an eventual seat in Congress, where he could continue the same struggle from inside the corridors of power. It is also noteworthy that he decided to frame his story around the inauguration of America’s first Black president. This moment also did not mean that final victory had been achieved, but it signified new opportunities for Black Americans to gain what had been so long denied them.