Public Interest
Jun. 21, 2002
Leadership, Courage Mark Civil Rights Hero
LOS ANGELES - For anyone who has fought for civil rights and equal justice, or clean air and fair housing, and for anyone who strives to erase the scars of racial inequality or sometimes feels crushed by the weight of poverty and injustice, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., has a message to deliver.
Just hold on, says the legendary leader of the civil rights movement, who as a young man in the 1960s put his life on the line for the rights of all Americans to vote and have access to public places.
"Just hold on, keep pushing and pulling, and don't ever give up, give out, or give in," Lewis said this week from his 5th Congressional District office in Atlanta.
Today, Lewis is in Los Angeles to accept Public Counsel's highest honor, the William O. Douglas Award, for his lifelong dedication to equality, humanity and what he calls "The Beloved Community."
Lewis will receive the award this evening at the pro bono law firm's 26th annual Douglas Dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills.
Anticipating the event, civil rights advocates and public interest lawyers hailed Lewis for his leadership and courage in peacefully confronting violent opposition to equality in the South and with laying the foundation for changes that would touch the lives of all Americans into the 21st century.
"When direct action was required, when it was time to take to the streets, John Lewis was there," said Elaine Jones, president and director-counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund in New York. "He was fearless. He took beatings that would have killed most people, and he survived."
"There would be no Voting Rights Act if it weren't for the likes of John Lewis," ACLU Foundation of Southern California Legal Director Mark Rosenbaum said Monday. "He redeemed the conscience of America and inspired a generation to believe in the possibility of civil rights."
Though the movement concentrated on the rights of African-Americans, it also helped redeem other nonwhite minority groups, advocates said.
"We were organizing in California and throughout the Southwest as the civil rights movement was taking place in the South," said Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in 1962. "Lewis' leadership spread a long way. It inspired us in our fight for desegregation, voting rights and Social Security."
"The civil rights movement resulted in changes to immigration laws that allowed millions of Asian-Americans the opportunity to live in the United States," said Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
Public Counsel President Daniel Grunfeld said that Lewis' unbending commitment to equal justice makes him an ideal recipient of the Douglas Award, particularly during a statewide budget crisis that has thrown impoverished clients of the public interest group further into despair.
"Lewis and the leaders of the civil rights movement abhorred passivity, and they stood up to injustice with personal style and courage," Grunfeld said. "That message resonates today as it does during any time of crisis.
"The whole notion of volunteerism for the cause of justice is central to Public Counsel's mission. You don't have to be Mother Teresa, but the message is, Don't sit back; it's not OK to accept things the way they are."
Dubbed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "The Boy From Troy," Lewis, the son of sharecroppers from Troy, Ala., was among the youngest demonstrators to lead the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.
Lewis was born in 1940 and raised on his parents' 110-acre farm, where he and his nine siblings tended cotton fields, gathered peanuts and pulled corn.
He first came under King's spell after hearing a radio sermon on WRMA out of Montgomery, Ala., in early 1955. In 1956, after feeling the sting of racism in segregated Pike County, Lewis preached his first sermon.
In the spring of 1958, Lewis, who by then was a student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tenn., came face to face with King, having received an invitation to visit him at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery.
He soon became King's protégé, and in 1961, at 21, he rode a Greyhound bus from Atlanta, Ga., to Birmingham, Ala., to Montgomery, to test a Supreme Court ruling that banned segregation in an interstate travel facility.
At 23, Lewis helped form and became chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized sit-ins and other activities in the struggle for civil rights. He was the keynote speaker of the historic "March on Washington," in August 1963.
On March 7, 1965, he led 600 demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on their way to Montgomery to demand equal voting rights for African-Americans and other minorities, where they met with angry resistance. He was just 25.
"Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning," Lewis has said of that day, known as "Bloody Sunday," in which he was beaten to the ground by Alabama state troopers wielding nightsticks and bullwhips.
For the cause, Lewis was arrested more than 40 times and risked his life on numerous occasions. Throughout his life, Lewis, now in his eighth term in Congress, says he has followed the "call of conscience."
On Monday, he urged the legal community to do the same.
"Without staying true to the cause of providing legal assistance, we may never receive simple justice," Lewis said. "We must review our progress and assess the distance we have yet to travel and take direct action to dramatize issues and sensitize society about the need for equality in housing and voting rights.
"We've come too far. We need to make a little more noise."
Lewis credits the rule of law in the United States with being the foundation for a "nonviolent revolution of ideas and values."
Lawyers have played a central role in that revolution, he said - and that is a role they must continue to fulfill.
"I've seen lawyers not just seeking to right a wrong but also provide counsel as to what legal and extralegal means you can use in taking direct action," he said. "Some have suffered a great deal."
He pointed to Fred Gray, the Legal Defense Fund lawyer who represented activist Rosa Parks, and to Z. Alex Lubey, another Legal Defense Fund lawyer whose house was firebombed in Nashville, on April 19, 1960.
Though today's means and methods and repercussions of civil action may be less severe than they were 40 years ago, they are no less important, Lewis said.
"The same way we fought for public accommodation and transportation for African-Americans, we must now fight for the right of health care for 40 million people who go without," he said. "Martin Luther King said, 'The time is always right to fight for what is right.'"
Some observers question whether any causes on today's stage can live up to the importance of the civil rights movement during the '60s.
Rosenbaum acknowledged that current health, educational and environmental concerns pale in dramatic significance to the struggle leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
And while protesters took direct action in Seattle at the World Trade Organization summit in 1999, he said, and the 2000 Democratic National Convention had its share of demonstrations, such events failed to define a generation like the civil rights movement did in the 1960s.
"It was through Lewis' actions that the civil rights movement became dramatic," Rosenbaum said. "But it wasn't just the strategy of the movement. It was dramatic because it was a way of life.
"The conscience of that movement exists today, but there's more loose rhetoric about nonviolent protest as an occasional tactic."
Yet one needs only to visit an inner city school, a migrant farm community or an underfunded health clinic to comprehend the need for direct action, he said.
"There still is no equal education or anything close, and poverty still ravages our society," Rosenbaum said. "Lewis' successors are in court rooms and in communities addressing these issues, but it's hard to galvanize a generation.
"We should not forget that he risked his life at a young age for these ideals."
In 1966, Lewis was ousted from the student network he helped form by Stokely Carmichael and other more radical activists. He remained active in the civil rights movement by organizing voter registration programs and went on to form the Voter Education Project, adding 4 million minorities to the voter rolls.
In 1977, President Carter appointed him director of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency. Lewis became community affairs director of the National Consumer Co-op Bank in Atlanta in 1980 and was elected to the Atlanta City Council in 1981.
Lewis was elected to Congress in 1986. He is a member of the House Ways and Means Committee and serves as a chief deputy Democratic whip.
A member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Lewis also serves on the Democratic steering committee.
His visit to Los Angeles awakens bittersweet memories, he said Monday.
His wife Lillian was born and raised here, he said, and he enjoys looking out over the Pacific Ocean and dropping by the California African-American Art Museum.
However, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, which he witnessed at the Ambassador Hotel, on June 5, 1968, haunts him, he said.
"I cannot come to L.A. without remembering June of 1968," he said with a sigh.
Lewis recalled going to Washington in 1963 for the first time to meet with Kennedy - who was U.S. attorney general at the time - on his way to demonstrations to open public accommodations for African-Americans in Cambridge, Md.
Kennedy showed a "fierce determination to enforce the civil rights laws of the nation," he said.
"By 1968, there was so much hope, so much optimism," Lewis said. "We were sure [Kennedy] would win the Democratic primary and the nomination and go on to be elected president."
Despite the shock and disappointment of June 5, Lewis remained hopeful as he fought for change, he said.
As he travels to Los Angeles, he recognizes he is visiting a community that faces many challenges left over from that era, he said.
"At times, it seems that L.A. is going to become many different cities," Lewis said. "But I'm confident of efforts to hold together as one house, one family."
Huerta said that, similarly, racial and ethnic groups in this city and throughout the country need to form stronger coalitions to continue to fuel the progress started in the 1960s.
"During the movement, we reached out to one another from the ground up," she said. "These days, the powers that be have divided blacks from other blacks and Latinos on issues where we should unite."
"Any splits in the African-American community show how far we have come, that we can afford the luxury of not being of one accord," Lewis replied. "We have different leaders with different voices. We can no longer expect any group to speak with the same style or voice or take the same action or approach."
"The only thing that never changes is change," Jones said. "And as issues are always shifting and evolving, individuals and institutions will try to pit people against one another, but there is a lot of unified activity that is not always in plain view, and I think that's a good thing.
"When you are in a struggle for social justice, you have to have optimism."
Victor Narro, the co-executive director of Sweatshop Watch and the former workers' rights project coordinator for the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles, said that Lewis is chiefly responsible for creating a bridge between the civil rights movement in the South and today's immigrants' rights movement in Texas and California.
"The struggle for immigrants' rights today is comparable to the African-American struggle in the 1950s," Narro said. "Proposition 187 [the 1994 voter initiative to bar educational and social services for undocumented aliens] was a wake-up call for Latinos in California.
"We saw that the only way to change is at the ballot box, and we can look back at the struggle of blacks to get to the ballot box. Latinos are more powerful now than they were 10 years ago as a result of this realization."
Kwoh said that, when Asian-Americans wonder why they should celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday, he asks them when they arrived in the United States.
"If they say after 1970, I tell them that they never would have made it without the civil rights movement," Kwoh said, pointing to the 1965 amendments to the Immigration Act of 1952 and to the subsequent lifting of the National Origins Quota System that allowed only 100 immigrants per year from Asian countries.
Lewis laughs at these revelations with the wisdom of a veteran of many battles.
"Sometimes, I jokingly say that our forefathers came in different ships, but we're all in the same boat now," he said.
As a legislator, Huerta said, Lewis has supported immigrant workers by opposing efforts to bring contract labor from Barbados, Mexico and Haiti into the United States, which would deprive residents of jobs.
"I can speak for Cesar [Chavez] on this, because I know he was always grateful to Mr. Lewis for all his efforts," Huerta said.
Since becoming a member of Congress in 1986, Lewis has supported patients' bill of rights, the right of homeless people to vote, tax credits for low-income housing and clean air and water initiatives.
He has opposed most-favored-nation status for China on human rights principles and opposed military assistance for the Border Patrol along the Mexican-American border.
For the past 12 years, Lewis also has fought for the creation of an African-American Heritage Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Just last year, Congress approved formation of a commission to operate the museum under the National Park Service.
While a few questioned whether Lewis' 16 years in Congress have lived up to his early heroism, those who know him say that's an unfair question.
"Do not hold people up to a yardstick that you yourself cannot live up to," Jones said. "John Lewis set the bar very high, and what's amazing is that after surviving the civil rights movement, he took that energy and keen sense of fairness and put it to work in the U.S. Congress.
"Now think about that."
As an activist, Lewis has been canonized as a hero. He is a prolific speaker and collector of honorary degrees and awards, including the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation's Profile in Courage Award in 2001; the Wilderness Society's Ansel Adams Award for his efforts to clean up polluted rivers, lakes and trout streams, in 2001; and the NAACP's highest achievement, the Spingarn Award, in April.
He is widely respected in Congress though it is inevitable he will always be recognized largely for the historic role he played during the civil rights movement.
"Yet he brings the same vigor, the same vitality and the same courage to the U.S. Congress that he brought to the streets of Alabama," U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, said. "He has not tried to be anyone other than who he is, and he uses every opportunity to be a spokesperson for civil liberties, human rights and above all, for nonviolence."
In 1990, the National Journal named him one of 11 "rising stars in Congress."
In 1998, Congressional Quarterly named him a Liberal Stalwart in its edition "50 Ways to do the Job in Congress."
Republicans might recall that he led the way in calling for prosecution of former House Speaker and Senate majority leader Newt Gingrich in 1994 for allegedly lying to a special investigator about his role in a tax-fraud scheme.
Democrats and civil rights advocates will recall in 1997 that Lewis publicly implored Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to approve President Clinton's appointment of former Legal Defense Fund lawyer Bill Lann Lee as assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights.
"Don't hold Bill Lann Lee as a political hostage in your war on affirmative action," Lewis said, addressing his remarks to the Judiciary Committee, which finally approved Lee's appointment in August 2000.
Lee, who served through the end of Clinton's term and now is a partner at San Francisco's Lief, Cabraser, Heiman & Bernstein, was unavailable for comment.
On Monday, as Lewis contemplated the audience of lawyers he will address, he said that the United States is a better country thanks to the rule of law but that he is not satisfied with other developments.
"I am deeply troubled by the policies of the [Bush] administration in establishing a Department of Homeland Security that threatens the civil rights of our citizens," he said. "I don't want to see people being stopped because their name sounds different or people looking over their shoulder or spying on their neighbor or watching other people with suspicion.
"That's not the America we fought for and not the America that I walked across that bridge in Selma for."
Lewis will encourage his audience tonight to carry on with its mission in upholding civil rights and serving the legal needs of the poor - despite the overwhelming pressure faced by those who advocate for the needy.
He will tell them "not to get lost in a sea of despair and not to become bitter or hostile."
"I believe in continued efforts," he said.
Jeffrey Anderson
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