Goodbye, and Thank You, John

In these turbulent days of pandemic, crisis, and corruption when we long for courage and inspiring leadership, it's particularly painful to wake up to John Lewis's passing. 

Before I emigrated to the USA, I had a constellation of heroes and saints I handpicked from our brutal history of racial injustice that helped shape my personal American Dream. In my youthful imagination, icons like Dylan, Kerouac, Hendrix, Little Richard, Prince, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, represented the wildness and abandon of American pop culture. But it was a small group of Black writers, fighters, and heroes that gave the country it's steel, fire, soul and yearning, and reminded me that America was still a work in progress I could help complete.

I was fascinated by Harriet Tubman's astounding story of overcoming personal trauma and injury, escaping slavery and freeing dozens of slaves. I admired Rosa Parks for her activism and sparking the Civil Rights Movement with her incredible defiance in the Montgomery bus incident. Ralph Ellison's "The Invisible Man" is a narrative that resonates deeply within me, and is the quintessential story of every person of color trying to make it in America. Perhaps it’s the story of every colored outsider in the white world. I consider James Baldwin to be one of the greatest writers and orators of all time. Few can convey a thought with such eloquence and fiery beauty as he can, but he was also an ardent champion of his people and all marginalized people. 

I can add nothing about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. except I once spent a day with another icon of mine, Joan Baez, and she spoke about his love of singing and music, and they often sang together. While looking up the hero in the words of Dylan's "Only a Pawn in Their Game," I discovered Medgar Evers, the Civil Rights activist who worked tirelessly against segregation and was eventually murdered, like Malcolm X, Dr. King, and so many others. 

Paul Robeson is a towering figure in American history for me. He was an iconic singer, actor, Civil Rights activist who connected African Americans' struggles to those of the oppressed around the world and refused to back down even in the face of FBI and CIA harassment. I don't think we have given this giant of an artist and activist the recognition he deserves.

In skimming over the spellbinding stories of these heroes and their bravery, sacrifices, and achievements, I am doing them a disservice, and I also am leaving out others like Malcolm X and Angela Davis who set my imagination on fire. Still, John Lewis's passing has disoriented me.

John’s story is, in some ways, the story of the resilience of Black America. The New York Times published a comprehensive obituary today, which is worth reading - it summarizes the sheer magnitude of the man's achievements and the catalog of courage, perseverance, and moral leadership he represented. The obit is a reminder that 55 years after Bloody Sunday, when John Lewis and others bled for black people to be able to vote, we may have made some progress, but not nearly enough. 

Last year, I visited Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, as an homage to John Lewis and others who marched for the right to vote on March 7, 1965. It was sobering to remember that "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, a trooper cracked Mr. Lewis's skull with a billy club, knocking him to the ground, then hit him again when he tried to get up" (NYT)

But John had been beaten, spat upon, subjugated, confined, and humiliated by white people numerous times before. According to the NYT, "Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966. He was repeatedly beaten senseless by Southern policemen and freelance hoodlums. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Ala., after he and others were attacked by hundreds of white people. He spent countless days and nights in county jails and 31 days in Mississippi's notoriously brutal Parchman Penitentiary"

I won't recount John's achievements or his record in Congress except to say he was one of the few Democrats who opposed the Persian Gulf war, skipped the inauguration of George W Bush and Donald Trump, led a sit-in on the floor of the House of Representatives against federal inaction on gun control, and voted against increased military spending. 

African-Americans can vote now, but the bridge where John Lewis and his brave fellow activists were brutalized to enable this right remains a symbol of stasis. It is named after Edmund Pettus, a Confederate brigadier general who supported slavery and racism and was the head of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

I thought about this as I took pictures and walked its span. How long will it take us to truly confront our genocidal past and cleanse ourselves of racial injustice and inequality? When will we wash the bloodstains of racism and slavery from that bridge and put John Lewis’s name on it?

Still, the lifelong sacrifice people like John Lewis have made for this country have brought us to this point from where we can move forward together much faster to complete the project that is America. I take hope in John's response to a question posed by CBS News in the wake of the George Floyd murder:

“It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds of thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets — to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call ‘good trouble,’”

Goodbye, and Thank You, John.