The Witness of John Lewis

In a report about John Lewis on Face the Nation this week, John Dickerson stated that on that fateful day in Selma, in 1965, as the march began across the Edmund Pettus Bridge,  a young 25-year-old John Lewis expected to spend the night in jail, so he carried two books in his pocket. One was The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, by Richard Hofstadter; the other was The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton.

The Privilege of Books

That book by Thomas Merton caught my attention. I think of where I was at 25 years of age. I was in seminary and had just discovered Thomas Merton, but the witness of these two books in John Lewis’s pocket reveals how far ahead the young John Lewis was compared to my own life when I was 25, sitting in relative ease in seminary classes. The Selma march was two years after an even younger Lewis gave a speech at the March on Washington in 1963.

John Lewis had those two books in his pocket to have something on hand to read while in jail, for he fully expected to be arrested that day. He did not know that he would instead spend the night in a hospital after having his skull fractured by a policeman’s billy club.

The Privilege of Libraries

Lewis was born in Troy Alabama, his father was a share-cropper. He has told of his dismay when he tried to get a book from the public library and was told that the library was for whites only, not for black children. He recounted that that incident made him all the more determined, he said to get an education.

When I was a boy growing up in Alabama, the library was a special place. I remember when the Dadeville Library was in an older building on the town square, and I also remember when it moved to a nice new building just beyond the town square. That was, indeed, a proud day for the town. It was always a delight to visit the library when I was a boy, but looking back, I also remember that there were no black patrons there.

John Lewis’s story is a painful reminder of the white privilege that made my life easier but spurred Lewis to become an agent of change and transformation. With his life, he was able to offer the nation hope.

-