DUE SOUTH:The civil rights movement is still relevant in today's United States. Two contemporaries of Dr Martin Luther King jnr reflect on those dangerous days, in part three of our series on the American South
THE STATE TROOPERS stand to the left, taut, helmeted, with pistols at their side and nightsticks at the ready. The African-Americans face them, wearing neckties and overcoats. Though defenceless, the black men personify the immovable force of the civil-rights movement, frozen in time by a photographer’s shutter on the US’s Bloody Sunday, March 7th, 1965.
Forty-six years later the black-and-white image still exudes racial tension. John Lewis was 25 years old in the photograph. Before he was elected to lead the black Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee two years earlier, Lewis had already been arrested 24 times.
In an earlier confrontation with white supremacists Lewis was knocked off a stool by a blow to the mouth at a Woolworths luncheon counter in Nashville. On another occasion, as one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who travelled from Washington DC to Mississippi 50 years ago to desegregate public transport, Lewis was beaten by a Ku Klux Klansman when he tried to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He was then beaten unconscious two weeks later in the bus station in Montgomery, Alabama.
“You come to the point where you feel that something is so right and so necessary that you are prepared to die for it,” Lewis says, recounting the myriad humiliations of racial segregation in the American South.
On Bloody Sunday the troopers fractured his skull. “This is an unlawful march,” intones Lewis, now 71, imitating Maj John Cloud, the Alabama state-trooper commander, as I study the photograph in his office on the 19th floor of an Atlanta high-rise. “You will not be allowed to continue. I give you three minutes to disperse and return to your church.”
Hosea Williams, who’d been sent to the march by Dr Martin Luther King jnr, asked Maj Cloud to give him a moment to kneel and pray.
“But Cloud said, ‘Troopers, advance’, and we saw these men put on their gas masks,” says Lewis. “They came towards us, beating us with nightsticks and bullwhips, trampling us with horses and releasing tear gas. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. I fell to my knees. I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die . . . I don’t recall how I made it back across the bridge, through the streets of Selma, back to the little church where we’d left from.”
Two days later three white pastors who supported the African-Americans were so severely beaten that one of them, James Reeb, died. Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit who ferried demonstrators between Selma and Montgomery, was also killed by the Klan.
“They called the whites who participated with us ‘nigger lovers’ and traitors to the white race,” Lewis recalls. “A tremendous amount of violence was directed against them.”
Today, Lewis has been a Democratic congressman for Atlanta for 24 years, often re-elected with 70 per cent of the vote. The House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, calls him “the conscience of the congress”.
In the summer of 1963 Lewis helped organise the March on Washington DC where Dr King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. Lewis is the only one of that day’s 10 keynote speakers still living. President Barack Obama invited him to sit on the stage during his inauguration, and dedicated a commemorative photograph to him with the words: “Because of you, John.”
“I cried so much that day,” Lewis says of the inauguration. “I looked past President Obama, and I saw the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And I started thinking about presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy. But also about Martin Luther King jnr and the other eight speakers that led the march, the four little girls in Birmingham, the three civil-rights workers, just wishing to myself that they could be there.
“So many of these people were beaten and jailed and terrorised and literally gave their blood. If it hadn’t been for them, there would be no Barack Obama as president of the US.”
On the morning of August 28th, 1963, Dr King, Lewis and the others rose early to call on congressional leaders – it was Lewis’s first visit to Capitol Hill – then walked down Constitution Avenue. “The 10 of us saw this sea of humanity coming at us from Union Station, hundreds, thousands,” he says. “It was like Gandhi said: ‘There go my people; I must run to catch up with them.’ We lined up in front, holding hands, and the sea just pushed us forward.”
Does he ever miss the intensity of the 1960s? “I miss the sense of movement,” Lewis says. “I miss the sense that people were so determined. I miss Dr King. I miss his leadership. I miss his voice, I guess, more than anything else.”
Like many veterans of the civil-rights era, Lewis laments the apathy of young people today. "I tell them they need to dosomething. They need to act," he says.
Perhaps there is no longer a cause comparable to civil rights in the 1960s? “Immigration,” Lewis answers immediately. “Immigration is the issue. There is no such thing as an illegal human being.”
He is alarmed by the viciousness of political discourse in the US. “Sometimes I think this period is worse than the period of the civil-rights movement,” Lewis says. “You had overt violence then. But words can be so violent.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign Lewis warned Sen John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, to “pull back”. He feared that Palin’s talk of “taking our country back” would “encourage the fringe elements to take matters into their own hands”. That fear has not subsided.
“I used to say about governor George Wallace: ‘He never pulled a trigger, he never put a bomb, but he created the climate, the environment, for others to pull the trigger and put the bomb,’” Lewis says.
Some racists repent in old age. In May, John Patterson, a former governor of Alabama, attended the opening of a museum dedicated to the Freedom Riders. “He apologised for what happened. He hugged us, shook our hands, ate lunch with us,” says Lewis.
The month after Obama’s election Lewis received a visit from Elwin Wilson, the now elderly Ku Klux Klansman who beat him in Rock Hill bus station in 1961. “He said, ‘Mr Lewis, will you forgive me?’, and started crying. He brought his son. I’ve seen him at least four times since then. He called me brother, I called him brother.”
BERNARD LaFAYETTE, another prominent veteran of the civil-rights movement, now a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, regrets that the events of a half century ago are so little taught in US schools, “because you cannot avoid teaching some of the shame . . . It raises a lot of questions about why this happened and who created the situation”.
As a result, LaFayette says: “Young people don’t have an appreciation for the fact that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”
In Memphis on the day Dr King was assassinated, LaFayette said farewell to the black leader, who was sending him to launch a campaign against poverty in Washington. King’s last words to him were: “Bernard, it’s time to institutionalise and internationalise non-violence.”
LaFayette has been true to the mission Dr King entrusted to him, establishing 22 institutes for the study of non-violence around the world, including 10 in the US. In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, Dr King wrote of workshops where students repeatedly asked themselves, "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" and "Are you able to endure the ordeals of jail?".
Perhaps the most powerful evidence I saw of Dr King’s legacy was during a visit to the home of upper-middle-class African-Americans in Buckhead, an affluent suburb of Atlanta. Their parents had persuaded two of their own children and two children of neighbours, one Asian and one white, to talk to me about race. All four children, aged from nine to 15, believed they could become anything they wanted in the US, and all four said they would be happy to marry someone of another race.
Fifteen-year-old Maxwell had something of the intelligence and determination of Congressman Lewis, whom he admires. Yet when I pried, the black children admitted to past slights and hurt feelings. Racism “kind of floats around up there”, Maxwell said, gesturing towards the ceiling. “And it kind of comes down sometimes.”
With the disarming frankness of a child, Kelley, aged nine, told me how children who were “stuck in the past” relegated black children to the same kickball team at her school last year. The instigators were punished, but the incident troubled the girl. “Sometimes I sit in bed and think about how we were slaves and they could hurt us. We were like their dolls. They could throw us away,” Kelly said. “I think about how they treated us in the 1960s, that we were not equal. We were below them. We were nothing, like a rock.
“Today it’s a lot different,” Kelley added. “We have neighbours who are different races, who are our friends. If it wasn’t for the people who stood up and said it was wrong, we wouldn’t be on the same buses. We wouldn’t drink from the same water fountains. We would be separated by race.”
