John Lewis: A Life, David Greenberg. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9781982142995) 2024.

Summary: A biography tracing the work of John Lewis from non-violent civil rights activism to Congress.

One image is etched in my mind from the Civil Rights movement. It is John Lewis being bludgeoned by police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. It was Lewis, not Dr. King at the head of the march that day. His skull was fractured. But five months later, he was at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, on August 6, 1965. The one event gave the needed impetus for the other. Bloody Sunday epitomized the life of John Lewis, which helps to explain why the annual commemorations were so important. Non-violent resistance. Unwillingness to back down. Love for one’s enemy. Surrendering his body to beatings and prison.

David Greenberg, in John Lewis: A Life, traces his childhood in rural Troy, his early call to preach, and enrollment in a Nashville Seminary. Greenberg recounts how Lewis heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak on the philosophy of non-violence on the radio, was trained by James Lawson, and quickly became a leader of sit-ins at lunch counters across Nashville. From the Nashville Student Movement, he was called upon to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and enlisted as a Freedom Rider. More confrontations with police and arrests followed. Then the March on Washington, where he gave one of the harshest addresses, even after “editing.” Greenberg covers his work during Freedom Summer to register voters in 1964, a leadup to the campaign in Selma in March of 1965.

Subsequently, SNCC experienced turmoil. In particular, factions developed questioning Lewis’s leadership and commitment to non-violence. Ultimately, this culminated in an election forcing Lewis out of leadership. Instead, the radical Stokely Carmichael took over. He worked for a time in New York, but the work and town didn’t fit. In a chapter titled “RFK,” Greenberg chronicles the work Lewis did with RFK and the successive assassinations of King and Kennedy.

In 1969, Lewis found his feet once more around mobilizing the vote, heading up the Voter Education Project, registering over four million voters. He followed that up with a brief stint in the Carter administration. In 1981, he won a seat on the Atlanta City Council, where he served until 1986. Then, Lewis turned another corner. At the urging of his wife, he ran for the open house seat in Georgia’s fifth District. Unfortunately, his old friend Julian Bond was also running. At first, polls favored Bond. But Lewis worked hard and used the rumors of Bond’s cocaine habit against him, challenging him to a drug test. Lewis won the election but lost the friendship.

The remainder of the book covers his congressional career. While Lewis represented his district well, he never became a political leader. Instead, he was a moral leader of the House. Greenberg describes his loyalty to the Clinton’s, especially during the Lewinsky affair. This caused him problems later. He supported Hilary in her run for president against a much younger Barack Obama. Under significant pressure to support Obama, the Clinton’s graciously released him from his commitment, an act which spoke well of them. Although late in support of Obama, Lewis campaigned vigorously. Later, Obama signed Lewis’s inaugural program “Because of you, John.”

Greenberg ends the book with Lewis’s final illness from pancreatic cancer, his fight, and last act before his final decline, to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza. Speaking of his illness, he said,  “I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life. I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”

Greenberg captures the resilience of John Lewis that only death could stop. He fought injustice without violence while never hating. He did not lose hope despite the persistence of racism. His final op-ed in the New York Times on the day of his funeral gave voice to that enduring hope, in the words “Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation.” Those words, and Greenberg’s biography are good sustenance for our time.