It’s somehow fitting that civil rights heroes C.T. Vivian and John Lewis died on the same day, July 17, 2020. They have much in common and were friends, but they’ll always be tied to Selma, Alabama and Sheriff Jim Clark. It was there, in 1965, that Clark punched Vivian in the face after Vivan compared him to Adolf Hitler.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gHJjbDofd0And it was there in Selma that John Lewis had his skull fractured by Alabama State Troopers while Clark’s police force looked on.
From the inception of my blogging career, I have consistently called John Lewis the greatest living American, and that is because he was the most courageous and effective organizer in the history of this country. The beating he took at Selma on March 7, 1965 led directly to the passage in the U.S. Senate of the Voting Rights Act on May 26. The House followed suit on July 9, and President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law on August 6th.
Lewis was the martyr who actually lived. He was eventually elected to the Atlanta City Council and then to Congress, where he served sixteen terms, beginning in 1987 and ending on Friday when he succumbed to cancer. He will always be admired for his commitment to nonviolence, his superhuman ability to manage fear, and the fact that he actually won blacks the right to vote in the South.
He should be revered in the pantheon of the greatest of all Americans, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. He belongs with giants like Gandhi and Mandela.
No one should speak of him except with respect.
Never forget that many people wrote letters to Lewis apologizing for their actions, asking for forgiveness, and him giving it without hesitation.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Jim Clark says in 2006 before he died in 2007, “Basically, I’d do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again.”
We shall overcome, some day.
Thanks for including Rev. Vivian in this post. He started in the movement in 1947, helping to desegregate public facilities in Peoria, IL. Twelve years later he and Lewis were among the remarkable group of leaders in Nashville mentored by Rev. Jim Lawson. He created an organization that was the model for Upward Bound. He was a leader in dismantling the KKK into the 1980s and 90s. https://masscommons.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/without-people-like-c-t-vivian-thered-be-no-presidential-medal-of-freedom/