His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

This first chapter portrays John Lewis’s family background and childhood. His great-grandfather was born into slavery in Alabama one year before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. Meacham describes how Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War soon gave way to Jim Crow laws designed to keep Blacks down. Many of these laws were enshrined in a new Alabama state constitution created in 1901. Lewis was born in 1940, and, for context, the author cites local instances of the terror inflicted on Blacks in that era—from kidnapping and rape to lynching.

Lewis’s father was a sharecropper until he and his wife managed to buy their own farm when Lewis was four. As a boy, Lewis loved making things grow and taking care of the family’s chickens. Captivated by church at an early age, he began “preaching” to the birds as if they were members of his own congregation. He even performed mock baptisms on them and held funerals when they died.

Early on, he became aware of racial inequities, such as segregated and inferior schools and public facilities. When he was 11, an uncle took him to visit relatives in Buffalo, New York, which opened his eyes to a different world—one in which Black and white people lived and shopped together. Three years later, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that having separate schools for different groups of people was inherently unequal, so public schools must be desegregated. Lewis expected rapid changes; however, school systems across the South stalled and evaded the new mandate. He hoped the church would weigh in on the issue, but his local minister was more concerned with the hereafter than life here and now.

Then he heard Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preaching on the radio. King’s message resonated with Lewis because it focused on the practical application of the Bible to the real world, and he soon decided he wanted to be just like King. His parents accepted the imperfect world as it was, but he wanted to change it—improve it. King would later speak of striving for “the Beloved Community,” or the Kingdom of God here on earth in which all people lived together in harmony, and that became Lewis’s vision too. Meacham explains the effects that events in the mid-1950s had on Lewis, such as the murder of Emmett Till (who was almost the same age as Lewis) and the Montgomery bus boycott (sparked when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the “whites only” section of a bus). These events only heightened his desire to work to effect change.

As he finished high school, Lewis found that his family’s meager financial resources limited his options for higher education. One day, his mother happened to pick up a brochure at her job about the American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABT) in Nashville, Tennessee. The school provided free tuition for students by giving them jobs on campus. This gave Lewis a route to college, and in the fall of 1957, he arrived in Nashville to start a new chapter in life.

This chapter covers Lewis’s college years at ABT, where he became active in the civil rights movement. On campus, he worked hard in his classes, and he and his classmates practiced their preaching on each other. One of his favorite classes was led by John Lewis Powell, who taught about Hegel’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It seemed to Lewis to have a natural order—a kind of fate that trended toward the good—one that the fight for racial justice would follow. He believed that this was the course of history overall and gave it a name: the Spirit of History.

When he heard about Black students’ efforts to integrate the University of Arkansas that fall, he wanted to do something similar. He decided to try to integrate Troy State College, which was close to his home in Alabama. In late 1957, he wrote to Martin Luther King for help with his plan, and King’s lawyer sent a reply. When Lewis was home in 1958 for summer vacation, King sent him a bus ticket to Montgomery to discuss it. King and his team warned of the difficulties that an integration effort would entail, such as threats to his family members. Lewis wanted to go through with it, and initially his parents supported him; however, upon reflection, they worried about the consequences and withdrew their support. He reluctantly abandoned his idea and returned that fall to ABT.

Lewis began attending First Baptist Church in Nashville, and it was there that he met Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who would have a deep influence on his life. Lawson, while a missionary in India, learned the nonviolent methods of protest that Mahatma Gandhi espoused. In Lawson’s Tuesday night workshops, Lewis studied the philosophy of nonviolence and learned how to put the tenets into practice. Lawson also took Lewis and other students to the Highlander Folk School, near Monteagle, Tennessee, where they had further training in nonviolent passive resistance.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 1959, Lewis first put his training into action. He and a group of friends went to Harvey’s Department Store in downtown Nashville and asked to be served at the lunch counter there. When they were refused, they asked to speak to a manager, who repeated the segregationist policy. With that, they turned and left; the first goal in their strategy was to confirm that such a policy existed. Then, in early 1960, he and his classmates were asked to support students in North Carolina who were conducting sit-ins (the nonviolent act of sitting down in a segregated facility and not leaving). In solidarity, Lewis’s group did the same in Nashville.

The first few sit-ins occurred without incident. The students stayed put even when restaurants closed because of their presence. This continued throughout the month until one Saturday at Woolworth’s, when a mob of white residents attacked Lewis and his friends. The police stood aside and let the assault happen, then stepped in to arrest the Black students—who took the blows peaceably without retaliation—for disorderly conduct. It was Lewis’s first arrest of what would be many in his lifetime. They refused to pay bail or fines, as that would signal participation in the unjust system. The mayor finally arranged for their release. The event made the national news and drew attention to the city. At a later mass march to the mayor’s house, the students received a promise from the mayor that he would end segregation at lunch counters.

Their efforts worked, all through peaceful, nonviolent demonstrations. They continued their strategy, hoping to change more institutions. Later that year, Lewis and some fellow demonstrators were sitting in at a fast-food restaurant when the manager evacuated the staff, locked the doors, and turned on a fumigator full of insecticide. The fire department arrived to save the students in the nick of time, but they realized that their work was getting dangerous. Some older leaders in the movement thought it was too risky and that they should stop such work. The young people, however, wanted to press on rather than give in to the violence. Lewis himself was committed to this path.