This week America mourned the passing of Representative John Lewis, a towering figure of the Civil Rights era, who died at age 80 from pancreatic cancer. The Civil Rights movement and its impact on America and the world are often not fully understood and appreciated by many, particularly by folk like us, immigrants from the Caribbean.
I always, in this regard, recommend to my students, and to others, the work of Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters. The first volume is the definitive history of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement and the struggle that changed American and the world forever. In it, Taylor Branch paints a vivid and panoramic portrait of the America of the Civil Rights movement. It is an America divided, an America at war with itself, an America which is transformed, yes redeemed, by a struggle that left no American untouched. This movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was carried by the spirit of a generation of young black leaders determined to seize equality and justice.
John Lewis was a member of that generation of young black leaders determined to seize equality and justice. Much like how the images of George Floyd’s murder has catalyzed the current national and global movement against systemic and structural racism, the pictures of the beating of John Lewis in Selma Alabama shocked the nation and led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
On March 7, 1965, John Lewis led one of the most famous marches in American history. Demanding voting rights long denied African Americans, Mr. Lewis and his fellow protestors marched partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a waiting phalanx of state troopers in riot gear. Ordered to disperse, the protesters silently stood their ground. The troopers responded with tear gas and bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. In the melee, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, an officer cracked Mr. Lewis’s skull with a billy club, knocking him to the ground, then hit him again when he tried to get up.
Televised images of the beatings of Mr. Lewis and scores of others outraged the nation. It increased popular support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson presented to a joint session of Congress eight days later and signed into law on August 6, 1965.
The Voting Rights Act was a milestone in the struggle for civil rights. The law struck down the required literacy tests that African Americans had to take before they could register to vote in many parts of the country, particularly in the South. The Act replaced segregationist voting registrars who had long denied the right to vote, guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to African Americans with federal registrars.
The Voting Rights Act ended legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote. It was one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.
One might ask, what is the importance of John Lewis and the Civil Rights movement to Guyanese? One example of the Civil Rights movement’s far-reaching consequence is the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. The Act addresses race discrimination in immigration.
In 1960, 84 percent of U.S. immigrants were born in Europe or Canada; 6 percent were from Mexico, 3.8 percent were from South and East Asia, 3.5 percent were from Latin America, and 2.7 percent were from other parts of the world.
In 2017, European and Canadian immigrants totaled 13.2 percent, while Mexicans totaled 25.3 percent, other Latin Americans totaled 25.1 percent, Asians totaled 27.4 percent, and other populations totaled 9 percent.
It is not hyperbolic to assert that John Lewis and the Civil Rights movement transformed the demographic and cultural character of the United States. By extension, they are directly responsible for the Guyanese and other large Caribbean communities that exist today in the United States! Yes, I would not be here without the Civil Rights movement and the work of Representative John Lewis, son of sharecroppers, apostle of nonviolence, and the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Representative Lewis was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated the famed lunch-counter sit-ins. He helped organize the March on Washington, where Dr. King was the main speaker. Mr. Lewis led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks, and swimming pools and fought against the indignities of second-class citizenship.
Elected to the House of Representatives in 1986, he became the second African-American to be sent to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction, representing a district that encompassed much of Atlanta, Georgia.
When the House voted in December 2019 to impeach President Trump, Representative Lewis articulated his creed on the House floor: “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ For some, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”
President Barack Obama, in bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, in a White House ceremony in 2010, said then of Representative Lewis: “Generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.”
We salute John Lewis on a life lived on the right side of history which opened the door to a more fair and just world.
Vale.
Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman, an associate professor of mathematics and founding member of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, was dean of the School of Science Health and Technology at Medgar Evers College, where he has worked for more than twenty-five years. He graduated from Queen’s College, Guyana, Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate School. .
