John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80

[guido]

John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80 - The New York Times

Such a hugely sad loss! He will be missed...

[jclay]

John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80 - The New York Times

Such a hugely sad loss! He will be missed...

Indeed. We need a lot more people like him and a lot fewer like Derek Chauvin, Donald Trump and their supporters. How folks who have enjoyed the benefits of a progressive society can embrace "conservatism", fail to see the monstrous injustices heaped on women demanding the vote and black folks demanding equality, and such as that, is astonishing. I'm glad my parents didn't live to see this train wreck.

[Gattonero]

If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

[thollandpe]

"Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."

— John Lewis

[bigbill]

I have to choose my topic for my 20th Century historiographic essay today. I'm a WWII history junkie, but I'm taking the death of John Lewis as a sign to choose Civil Rights. I don't know enough about the movement, I see this as an opportunity.

[Ras72]

@bigbill - the world could learn from your methodology - whatever the subject is. Thank you.

[davids]

John Lewis was a hero, the best of our country and a fulfillment of its promise. His death is a major loss.

I highly recommend David Halberstam's book "The Children" as an inspiring portrait of Lewis and his peers - names you know and names you don't - as they became the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement. Halberstam is a great, engaging writer and the stories he tells - he covered these people when he was a young reporter - are astounding.

[johnmdesigner]

I can't possibly imagine the trials and tribulations of this mans life. A life well lived and a life worth living.
I can only hope I can do some small part to continue his legacy.
We can all learn from his sacrifice and his commitment to humanity.
May he know he was loved and respected by us all.

[Gattonero]

John Lewis was a hero, the best of our country and a fulfillment of its promise. His death is a major loss.

I highly recommend David Halberstam's book "The Children" as an inspiring portrait of Lewis and his peers - names you know and names you don't - as they became the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights movement. Halberstam is a great, engaging writer and the stories he tells - he covered these people when he was a young reporter - are astounding.

Will be on my last, thanks!

[guido]

The Essential and Enduring Strength of John Lewis | The New Yorker

"By the time John Lewis made his exit from this realm, on Friday, his life had been bound so tightly and for so long to the mythos of the movement for democracy in America that it was difficult to separate him from it. For this reason, a friend who texted me “John Lewis is gone, what are we going to do now?” was not only reacting to grief but expressing a real and common sentiment. Lewis, who spoke at the March on Washington, chaired the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and served seventeen terms in Congress, representing Georgia’s Fifth District, succumbed to pancreatic cancer, a ruthless and efficient plague whose diagnosis is fatal around ninety-five per cent of the time. When he revealed his condition, last December, hope persisted despite those odds, in part because, for many people, the thought of confronting the reactionary, racist, and antidemocratic realities of the Trump era without one of the nation’s most potent symbols of decency was too difficult to countenance.

Those contrasts were not merely hypothetical. In 2017, when President Trump announced that he would attend the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, Lewis said that he would not. The then White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, seemed to accuse Lewis of failing to show proper respect for the movement. Months earlier, Trump had attacked the Fifth District as “crime-infested” and suggested that the blame lay with Lewis. I wrote at the time that Trump’s disdain for Lewis betrayed a theme: having never grasped the concept of sacrifice, the President is contemptuous of people whose lives have been defined by it. No criticism that Lewis issued about Trump was as strong an indictment as the simple facts of his life: born to Alabama sharecroppers, stalwart of SNCC, leader, exemplar of humility.

The civil-rights movement is best understood as a collaboration between two groups of people: the martyrs who died for the cause, and the stalwarts who were tasked with living for it. The first group is most commonly associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., whose death, at the hands of an assassin, cleaved an entire section of American history into before and after. But a different, strange, and particular burden befell the second group, the people who survived the manifold dangers of Albany, Anniston, Jackson, and Little Rock, and were then witness to the trials of crack and AIDS, violence, and mass incarceration. They were tasked with institutionalizing and defending the movement’s hard-won gains against the slow accretion of power by people who hoped to remake the present in the image of the past. Lewis, like his peers Andrew Young, Marion Barry, and Eleanor Holmes Norton, transitioned into elected office as the post from which he would undertake this work. It was not an easy undertaking."

[thollandpe]

A friend suggested that instead of renaming the bridge after him, we should tear it down and build a new one.

But in the very least we should not name public infrastructure after KKK leaders.

I signed, and donated.
The John Lewis Bridge Project