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 ALSO BY RAYMOND ARSENAULT

The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics

St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 1888–1950

Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights (editor)

The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960–1968
(coeditor with Roy Peter Clark)

Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida (coeditor with Jack E. Davis)

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2006; abridged edition
2011)

The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert
That Awakened America

Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney (coeditor with Orville Vernon
Burton)

Arthur Ashe: A Life

The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America’s Enduring Conflict (coeditor with
John David Smith)
John Lewis
 BLACK LIVES

Yale University Press’s Black Lives series seeks to tell the fullest range of stories
about notable and overlooked Black figures who profoundly shaped world history.
Each book is intended to add a chapter to our larger understanding of the breadth
of Black people’s experiences as these have unfolded through time. Using a variety
of approaches, the books in this series trace the indelible contributions that
individuals of African descent have made to their worlds, exploring how their lives
embodied and shaped the changing conditions of modernity and challenged
definitions of race and practices of racism in their societies.

ADVISORY BOARD

David Blight Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Jacqueline Goldsby

Yale University Harvard University Yale University
 John Lewis

IN SEARCH OF THE BELOVED COMMUNITY

Raymond Arsenault

Black Lives
 The Black Lives series is supported with a gift from the Germanacos
Foundation.
Published with assistance from Jonathan W. Leone, Yale ’86.

Copyright © 2024 by Raymond Arsenault.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,

business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

Set in Freight Text by Westchester Publishing Services, Danbury, CT.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023935308

ISBN 978-0-300-25375-7 (hardcover: alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of

Paper).
 To Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr.—

and to my beloved grandchildren,

Lincoln and Poppy Powers

 CONTENTS

PREFACE

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION. In Search of the Beloved Community

CHAPTER 1. “The Boy from Troy”
CHAPTER 2. Nashville
CHAPTER 3. In the Movement
CHAPTER 4. Riding to Freedom
CHAPTER 5. Mississippi Bound
CHAPTER 6. SNCC on the March
CHAPTER 7. “Bombingham” and Freedom Summer
CHAPTER 8. Atlantic City and Africa
CHAPTER 9. Selma and Bloody Sunday
CHAPTER 10. Leaving SNCC
CHAPTER 11. Transition and Tragedy
CHAPTER 12. Voting Rights and the New South
CHAPTER 13. Sweet Home Atlanta
CHAPTER 14. Mr. Lewis Goes to Washington
CHAPTER 15. Keeping the Dream Alive
CHAPTER 16. Politics and Remembrance
CHAPTER 17. The Conscience of Congress
CHAPTER 18. Good Trouble
CHAPTER 19. Perilous Times
EPILOGUE

NOTES

NOTE ON SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX
 PREFACE

T
HIS BOOK—the first attempt to write a comprehensive biography
of John Lewis—deals primarily with his public life, though it also
tries to recapture the most important elements of his private
experiences. Like most biographers, I am interested not only in his
public activities—his successes and failures, and his impact on the
world around him—but also in the personal and interior aspects of
his life story. While realizing no historian or biographer can ever
know everything there is to know about a historical figure, I hope
my research and writing reveal certain truths about his thoughts,
feelings, and character. Lewis has long been widely acknowledged as
a great man, a nonviolent warrior intent on bringing social justice
and racial equality to a nation beset by prejudice and more than two
centuries of broken promises to its most vulnerable citizens. But
what forces and influences set him apart from the rest of us? How
did he become a man capable of inspiring millions with his
commitment to democracy and freedom—with his ennobling ideas
about forgiveness, reconciliation, and an ideal society he called the
Beloved Community?
Finding the answers to these questions must begin with gaining a
historical perspective on his identity as an African American born in
Alabama in the mid-twentieth century. Just below the surface of
Lewis’s iconic public persona was a living, breathing human being, a
man descended from generations of men and women who endured
the horrors of slavery and its aftermath. Both the text and context of
his life, public as well as private, emerged from a litany of historical
injustices born of a racial dilemma that has long lain at the heart of
the American experiment. The rise of a mass movement intent on
challenging this dark reality is the broad story I want to tell. But fully
understanding Lewis’s part in it—how he helped to create a
movement that altered the trajectory of the civil rights struggle—will
require many pages of exploration and careful deliberation.
Maintaining a healthy level of scholarly detachment is always a
challenge when writing about an admirable figure like Lewis. But it is
especially difficult when the author both knows the subject
personally and shares many of his beliefs. This is the situation I
faced as I strove to maintain a critical edge that fostered a balanced
view of Lewis’s life. My intention throughout has been to avoid
hagiography and hero worship, telling Lewis’s full story with all of its
ups and downs intact. The result, I hope, is a realistic and nuanced
interpretation of one of the most intriguing figures of our time.
I first met Lewis during the fall of 2000 in his Washington
congressional office—a comfortable but cluttered room filled with
books, historical photographs, and civil rights memorabilia. Though
excited, I didn’t know quite what to expect. As a veteran historian of
the civil rights movement, I already knew about the basis of his
fame—about his bravery as a Freedom Rider in 1961, his speech at
the March on Washington in 1963, and his courageous march across
the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, two years later. But I
wondered what he would be like as a human being. Would he be
gracious and generous with his time, giving me the full, hourlong
interview I had requested? Or would he be cold and formal, perhaps
even dismissive?
The answer came almost immediately, as the congressman smiled
and extended his hand, asking me politely why I wanted to write a
book about the Freedom Rides. Over the next hour his warmth and
openness washed over me, putting me completely at ease. He not
only answered all of my questions, many of which he had
undoubtedly been asked hundreds of times in the past; he also
assured me that he genuinely valued truth-telling history—that he
wanted to see the true story of the Freedom Rides shared with as
much of the world as possible. As he once explained, he believed it
is imperative to “study and learn the lessons of history because
humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching existential
struggle for a very long time.” I knew, of course, that in 1998 he had
published a highly acclaimed autobiography, Walking with the Wind:
A Memoir of the Movement, for which he later received the 2006
Roosevelt-Wilson Award presented by the American Historical
Association to recognize “public service to the discipline of history.”1
The interview went well, and before we had finished he even
recruited me to help him contact the hundreds of Freedom Riders he
wanted to invite to an upcoming fortieth reunion, to which I was
also invited. By the time I left his office we had become friends,
drawn together by both emotional and intellectual ties. Thus began
a twenty-year friendship, a gift that afforded me numerous
opportunities to observe him “up close and personal.” The more I
saw of him, the more I came to appreciate his depth and character.
He was, without a doubt, a man of uncommon decency and almost
breathtaking moral courage. Not only did he live up to his reputation
for greatness, but he did so without a hint of pretense or self-
absorption. Early on, when I made the mistake of addressing him as
Congressman Lewis, he waved me off with a gentle admonition:
“Just call me John. Everyone does.”
There was a quiet shyness about him that magnified his charm.
To my surprise, he had a soft conversational voice that contrasted
with the soaring oratory he often displayed in the public arena. He
also had a slight but noticeable speech impediment that, combined
with a thick Southern drawl, gave him an air of vulnerability. But, as
he told the press on several occasions, he was primarily a man of
action, not of words. While many of his admirers found him to be
eloquent, he thought of himself as “a tugboat, not a showboat.”2
This unprepossessing self-image was consistent with his physical
appearance: his short stature, his stocky body, and his clean-shaven
head bearing the marks of beatings suffered during his movement
years. Lewis’s most revealing feature, however, was his dark brown,
penetrating eyes; it was there that one sensed the enormous energy
driving his spirit. As the journalist Milton Viorst noted after
interviewing Lewis in the mid-1970s, “beneath his unassertive
manner lay a fierce inner zeal, which gave him incredible courage
and inflexible will.”
 He could be dramatic and animated, especially when talking about
civil or human rights—or more mundanely when he confessed his
love of simple pleasures such as freshwater fishing and sweet potato
pie. Yet he never seemed flustered or diverted from what he wanted
to say or do. Even in highly stressful situations, he was always calm
and collected, as if guided by an inner peace grounded in faith and
tolerance. This poise allowed him to make decisions, large and small,
in accordance with his principles and not as reactions forged in the
heat of the moment. “I learned early on to pace myself,” Lewis once
remarked in an attempt to explain his personal style—his “curious
mixture of manners and militancy,” as the journalist John Egerton
put it. He recalled: “I felt we were involved in a lifetime struggle—
hard, tedious, continuous. There were disappointments, but I had
faith that continued pressure and pushing would pay off. . . . You
have to have a sense of hope to survive. I didn’t give up. I didn’t
become bitter or become engulfed in hatred. That’s just not a part of
me.”
I witnessed one telling example of this in 2011, when I visited his
office as part of a design team that hoped he would sponsor a multi-
million-dollar earmark appropriation for an expansion of the Freedom
Rides Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. Dressed in suits and ties,
looking like an official delegation with serious matters to discuss, we
arrived at the appointed time. Yet the congressman made us wait for
more than an hour before escorting us into his office. The reason for
the delay was his promise to help a fourteen-year-old boy from Ohio
with a National History Day school project on the history of Black
voting rights. The day’s schedule had gotten backed up, but Lewis
was not about to short-change the boy. He had promised to give him
an hour of his time, and no inconvenience for a delegation of adults,
no matter how important they might be, was going to prevent him
from following through with his promise. In my experience, he
always treated everyone—regardless of age, or race, or gender, or
social status—with the same respect and consideration. Equal
treatment was vitally important to him—not just under the law but in
all aspects of everyday life.
 Later that same year, in May 2011, I was privileged to witness a
second incident that revealed the depth of Lewis’s commitment to
equity and fairness. This time the essential values expressed were
forgiveness, compassion, and reconciliation. Fifty years earlier, on
May 9, 1961, Lewis and the other twelve original Freedom Riders
traveling from Washington to New Orleans encountered violent
resistance for the first time. As soon as they arrived at the
Greyhound bus terminal in the upcountry South Carolina mill town of
Rock Hill, Lewis and two other Freedom Riders were assaulted by a
gang of mostly young Klansmen. Lewis was punched and kicked,
suffering bruised ribs and cuts around his eyes and mouth and a
deep gash on the back of his head. This was his first serious beating
at the hands of white supremacist vigilantes, and he never forgot it.
Nor did one of his attackers, Elwin Wilson, a rough-cut twenty-four-
year-old with malice and racial hatred in his heart and mind.
Years later, after witnessing profound changes in the post–civil
rights South, Wilson found religion, relinquished his racial animus,
and left the Klan. But even after aging into his seventies, he still felt
guilty about the part he had played in the Rock Hill assault on Lewis
and the Freedom Riders. He felt a strong need to apologize to Lewis
in particular, and in 2009 he got his chance. After spotting Lewis on
television, sitting on the 2009 inauguration grandstand in the row
behind President Barack Obama, Wilson steeled his nerves and
contacted Lewis by phone to offer a tearful apology for what he had
done. Lewis accepted the apology, of course, and for most aggrieved
individuals that would have been the end to it. But not with Lewis,
now a congressional leader renowned for his belief in forgiveness,
generosity, and justice. Inviting Wilson to his office in Washington,
he embraced his former tormentor and adversary as a friend and
wept with him as they joyously prayed for redemption.
Two years later, during the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the
Freedom Rides, the two men met again, this time as guests on The
Oprah Winfrey Show. After learning about Wilson’s belated apology,
the show’s producers thought they had the perfect guest to
represent the theme of reconciliation—if this frail and enfeebled man
could hold it together long enough to tell his story in front of millions
of viewers. Sitting just off camera to Lewis’s right, I saw the look of
fear and bewilderment on Wilson’s face and worried there was no
way he would make it through a stressful, live interview. After Oprah
posed her first question, Wilson stammered nervously and then
retreated into silence, appearing to be on the verge of fleeing the
stage—until Lewis smiled and leaned toward him. Reaching out to
comfort him, the seventy-one-year-old congressman gently held
Wilson’s right hand and declared in a voice loud enough for everyone
in the studio to hear, “He’s my brother.” Among the nearly 180
Freedom Riders gathered in the Chicago studio audience—all of
whom knew they had just witnessed a powerful expression of the
compassionate, Beloved Community Lewis spoke about so often—
there was not a dry eye to be seen.3
These two incidents—Lewis’s respectful treatment of a young boy
seeking information on civil rights history, and his compassionate
rescue of an aging ex-Klansman—are not the most dramatic stories
of Lewis’s long and eventful life. Yet as micro-narratives of his
approach to ethical and moral challenges, they give us glimpses of
his inner self. Along with countless other human interactions
between him and other individuals—some of which will be discussed
in the chapters of this book—they reveal an important dimension of
his psyche and moral sensibility.
Lewis was called many things during his lifetime—ranging from
radical troublemaker and starry-eyed idealist to saint and civil rights
icon—and there was undoubtedly a measure of truth in each of
these characterizations. Yet no single label does justice to the
fullness of his remarkable life. Like the rest of us, he was capable of
contradiction, and of making mistakes and misjudgments. But he
was by no means an ordinary person. In company with a small
number of other transcendent historical figures—Martin Luther King
Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, to cite three examples
—Lewis became inextricably bound with the promise of freedom and
democracy. The meaning of his life, rooted as it was in his
passionate determination to replace the horrors of the past and
present with the future blessings of a Beloved Community, is worth
pondering in a nation still struggling to fulfill its professed ideal of
liberty and justice for all.
 ABBREVIATIONS

ABT American Baptist Theological Seminary

ACAHR Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union
ADA Americans for Democratic Action
BLM Black Lives Matter
CBC Congressional Black Caucus
CORE Congress of Racial Equality
CRDL Civil Rights Digital Library
FOR Fellowship of Reconciliation
FPI Faith and Politics Institute
ICC Interstate Commerce Commission
MFDP Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
NAG Nonviolent Action Group
NCCB National Consumer Cooperative Bank
NCLC Nashville Christian Leadership Council
NOW National Organization for Women
NSM Nashville Student Movement
PCTS Pike County Training School
PLO Palestine Liberation Organization
SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
SRC Southern Regional Council
SSOC Southern Student Organizing Committee
VEP Voter Education Project
VISTA Volunteers in Service to America
 Introduction
In Search of the Beloved Community

J
OHN ROBERT LEWIS (1940–2020) traveled a great distance during
his eighty years, moving from poverty to protest to politics. It is
little wonder that his extraordinary journey from the cotton fields
of Alabama’s Black Belt to the front lines of the civil rights movement
to the halls of Congress became the stuff of legend. Considering his
beginnings in a static rural society seemingly impervious to change
and mobility, the arc of his life had an almost surreal trajectory, even
though the obstacles he encountered along the way were all too
real. In this regard, Lewis merits comparison with the great
nineteenth-century figure Frederick Douglass, who went from an
enslaved laborer to a “radical outsider” as an abolitionist to a near
“political insider” after the Civil War. Like Douglass, he transcended
his humble origins with a fierce determination to change the world
through activism and ceaseless struggle, ultimately finding a path to
greatness that took him well beyond the limited horizons of Jim
Crow culture.1
During his years as a protest leader, from 1960 to 1966, Lewis
evolved from student sit-in participant to Freedom Rider to one of
the nation’s most visible voting rights advocates. By 1963, “the boy
from Troy,” as he was often called, had become chairman of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the
youngest member of the civil rights movement’s so-called Big Six,
joining A. Philip Randolph of the March on Washington movement,
Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), James Farmer of the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Whitney Young of the
National Urban League. Among these leaders, Lewis stood out as the
one most likely to put his body on the line, to have a bandage on his
head, or to find himself behind bars. Within movement circles, he
earned an unrivaled reputation for physical courage, enduring more
than forty arrests and nearly as many assaults. Decades later as a
congressman, he would urge his followers to make what he called
“good trouble,” a fitting rallying cry for a leader who as a young man
repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to shed “a little blood to
help redeem the soul of America.” That he did so without expressing
a hint of self-pity and without relinquishing hope of reconciliation
with those who beat or imprisoned him made him something of an
“enigma,” as the Nashville-based journalist John Egerton put it in
1970. “How could anybody who’s been through what that guy’s been
through,” one fellow activist marveled, “really be that free of
bitterness and hate?”2
Lewis’s status as a fearless nonviolent warrior was a major source
of his fame. But he also drew considerable acclaim for his steadfast
commitment to the moral elevation of humanity. Many observers,
both inside and outside the movement, characterized him as
“saintly,” particularly during his years as a congressman, when moral
and spiritual pronouncements punctuated his public speeches. His
pleas for mercy, peace, love, forgiveness, and reconciliation stood
out in a political system dominated by partisan rhetoric, intense
competition, and interest-group politics. In Washington, where talk
of civil rights was often shallow and abstract, he took full advantage
of his experiences as a freedom fighter, bringing into play the spirit
of a nonviolent movement enveloped in Christian and Gandhian
ideals. Invoking powerful historical images of communal
responsibility and common decency, he spoke with authority about
rising above self-interest and doing the right thing, especially on
matters of racial inequality and discrimination. Eventually, he won
recognition as “the conscience of Congress,” a scrupulous champion
of honesty and moral rectitude.
Lewis had many things going for him, from an endearing
personality and disarming modesty to a strong work ethic and an
indomitable will. But if there was one element that set him apart
from his peers—one indispensable secret to his success—it was his
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