Mourners visit a mural of Rep. John Lewis in Atlanta on July 18, 2020.Lynsey Weatherspoon/The New York Times News Service
Paul Saltzman is an Emmy-winning Oakville, Ont.-based filmmaker. His latest film is the documentary feature Meeting the Beatles in India, which is set to be released in September. He is also the president and CEO of Moving Beyond Prejudice.
John Lewis – the 80-year-old long-time Democratic congressman and towering U.S. civil-rights icon – is now tragically gone from this world. We have lost a great, non-violent warrior for the good of humankind – a lion in the pursuit of truth and human rights. More than anything, he believed in the U.S. Constitution’s concept of justice for each and every one of us in the world. He knew that we are a very clever species, for good and for evil, and that we desperately need glowing examples of women and men who show us the way through the darkness that we are so prolific at creating – not just for young people but for us older folks, too.
I miss him deeply.
And yet, in another way, I am happy for him. He believed in love and in the existence of divinity on Earth and in heaven, and I’m sure he is being welcomed to the top of the mountain and the infinite beyond by Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Lillian Miles, Fannie Lou Hamer, Paul Robeson and so many others who shared the journey with him and us. I know this because I knew him and the impact of all that progress he helped make.
In the summer of 1965, I started volunteering with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or as we often pronounced it, “snick”), joining up with the effort to help disenfranchised Black Americans register to vote in order to exercise their democratic rights. Although the U.S. Constitution was supposed to guarantee the concept of one person, one vote to all citizens regardless of colour, creed, gender or ethnicity, the Old South was simply not going to let Black people exercise their right to vote. Not if they could stop them.
And they certainly tried to stop them, and brutally, in any way possible. At that time if a Black person tried to register to vote at the county courthouse, the punishment was usually swift: They were fired from their jobs, often beaten and sometimes lynched. If the “uppity ‘N-word’ ” owned a house with a mortgage, the white bank manager would pull their mortgage, often forcing families out of their homes and deeper into poverty.
An image of Mr. Lewis is projected on to the pedestal of the statue of confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., on July 22, 2020.Steve Helber/The Associated Press
Indeed, our volunteering began with a 10-day SNCC training period in Washington, with Mr. Carmichael as our lead instructor. There, we learned the history, mechanics and strategies of the civil-rights movement, including how to lobby congressmen and senators in support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) – the civil-rights movement’s answer to Black Americans being refused membership from both major parties – which worked to integrate the Democrats.
We also took part in frightening role-playing exercises so we could learn how to non-violently protect ourselves if attacked, whether by the Ku Klux Klan, the police, sheriffs, highway patrolmen, or simply violent racist crowds. We practised getting away, but we also had to learn what to do if we couldn’t escape: drop to the ground and curl up in a protective position, with our hands behind our heads to protect our skulls; our arms across our ears, to protect our hearing; elbows to the front and closed around our cheeks, to protect our faces; knees pulled up to our chests and ankles crossed, to protect our groins. We learned to breathe deeply to lessen the panic of being violently attacked.
After our training, we drove south to Jackson, Miss., arriving late on a very hot summer afternoon, just in time for a meeting at a church in the Black section of town. That’s where I first met Mr. Lewis, who was one of SNCC’s founders and, at the time, its chairman. He spoke powerfully and eloquently at the front of the jam-packed church, outlining the plans for the peaceful demonstration scheduled for the next morning to a rapt crowd of several hundred civil-rights workers and volunteers: women and men, Black and white, young and old, local and from across the United States, and including a few Canadians.
For a number of days, he explained, members of the MFDP and their supporters had tried to present a petition to the federal attorney in Jackson, as was their right; they were arrested, instead. Each day more people would try, and each day they too would be arrested. By the time we arrived, the Jackson City Jail was full.
Mr. Lewis poses for a portrait in front of the John Lewis-Good Trouble art exhibit in the atrium of the domestic terminal at Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson International Airport on April 8, 2019.Alyssa Pointer/The Associated Press
Early the next morning, several hundred of us walked as outlined by Mr. Lewis the night before: in twos, walking silently on the sidewalks, obeying all traffic lights and road signs, as we headed to the state buildings where we could present our petition. We knew that in all likelihood we would be stopped, but still, I was surprised when we were intercepted just several blocks from the church – still in the Black section of town far from the downtown core – by city police, backed by state troopers, ordering us to stop and disperse or risk arrest.
Our leaders – I remember Mr. Lewis was up front – explained to the police chief that we were within our legal rights to proceed. He didn’t care. So within minutes we sat down, linking arms, in silent protest. Immediately, big white cage-trucks started pulling up, with a huge black metal cage in the back of each vehicle, built to hold human beings. On an order from the chief, the police quickly waded in, roughly pulling us apart, dragging us to the trucks, and throwing each person up and into the cages. I had never seen anything like this.
With the jail full, we were driven to the State Fair Grounds where they had surrounded two cattle buildings with barbed wire – one building for women and the other for men. Within the buildings we were separated, as was the way of segregation: whites at one end and blacks at the other, with guards in between to keep us from integrating. After a few days some of us were transferred to the City Jail, and in all we spent 10 days “inside.”
This was all according to plan for Mr. Lewis and other SNCC leaders. As he’d outlined that night at the church, the strategy was simple: Fill the jails and refuse bail, so as to let the word spread across the U.S. and beyond that the efforts of Americans in support of democracy were being brutally suppressed by Southern authorities. Even more importantly, filling the jails would press the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction included Mississippi, to expedite our cases before the courts.
Mr. Lewis, second from the right in the foreground, gathers with demonstrators ahead of a march in Selma, Ala., on Feb. 23, 1965.Anonymous/The Associated Press
This worked. It might have taken years for the charges against us to wind through the legal system, but the court agreed to fast-track our appeal of the charges against us for unlawful assembly and demonstrating without a city permit. At this point, we agreed to be released. Eight weeks later, the appeals court ruled in our favour, throwing out all charges against the more than 1,000 of us arrested. In addition, they ruled that the parade ordinances used to charge us were unconstitutional.
As I recall, the parade ordinances basically said if three or more people gathered they needed a permit. But of course, this edict was never wielded against white people – only to stop Blacks and their supporters from peacefully assembling to protest segregation and racism.
I had the honour and pleasure of again meeting Mr. Lewis several times over the years: to interview him in his office in Congress, where he served for 33 years and was the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation, and to film with him in Mississippi for the feature documentary The Last White Knight: Is Reconciliation Possible?
He told a story in that film that is well worth repeating. As a teenager in 1956, he and his family were so inspired by Dr. King that they went down to their local Alabama library to get a library card – only to be rebuffed. “We were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only. And not for coloureds,” he said. “I never went back to that library until July 5th, 1998, for a book signing of my book, Walking with the Wind. And hundreds of Black and white citizens showed up. We had a wonderful time. We had food. Something to drink. I signed a lot of books. And at the end of the little program, they gave me a library card. It says something about the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made in America.”
Like I said, I miss him: a lion on behalf of all of us, and all that is fair and just and equitable in life.
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