John Lewis did not know how to swim. He confessed that fact before two of the pivotal events of the civil rights movement. The first moment was comical, the second deadly serious. On August 25, 1963, three days before the March on Washington, Lewis and other young activists decamped to a friend’s home outside New York City, for a day of relaxation. One friend jokingly tossed Lewis into the backyard pool. As Lewis began to sink, he announced, “I don’t swim.” Another friend, Penn Kemble, jumped in and pulled Lewis out. Lewis later returned to the pool, in an inflatable chair, gin and tonic “nestled in an armrest notch.” When a phone call came for Lewis, nobody knew how to get him out. “We finally got him out with a net,” Rachelle Horowitz recalled in an interview with Rutgers historian David Greenberg. Greenberg explains that “someone hooked the raft with the long-handled cleaning tool and towed Lewis in”—it’s one of the many humanizing anecdotes Greenberg offers in John Lewis: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2024), animating the remarkable career of the activist and longtime congressman. Three days later, at the march, Lewis, the recently elected chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), delivered the day’s most confrontational speech. He was just twenty-three but already had participated in the student sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, enduring vicious beatings and assaults at the hands of white mobs.
In the moment for which Lewis is best remembered, he climbed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on a chilly day in March 1965, setting out on a march for voting rights. A phalanx of Alabama state troopers stood on the other side of the bridge, heavily armed and donning gas masks, and ordered the marchers to halt. Sheriff Jim Clark and his local “posse,” many of them on horseback, stationed themselves with the troopers, brandishing whips and clubs. Hosea Williams stared down at the Alabama River and then turned to Lewis. Williams asked: “Can you swim?” Lewis said no. “Neither can I,” replied Williams. “But we might have to.” The troopers charged at the marchers, the sound of the hooves matched by profane hollers of white spectators. Lewis would call this “without question” the scariest moment of his life. One trooper swung a club at the left side of Lewis’s head and fractured his skull. Lewis choked as tear gas filled the air and he drifted in and out of consciousness. He ended up in the hospital rather than the river.
The attack came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” and it would move President Lyndon Johnson to introduce a new voting rights bill. Lewis is one of the giants of the civil rights struggle, yet while dozens of biographies have been written about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the literature on Lewis remains thin. We should thus be grateful for two new biographies of Lewis: Raymond Arsenault’s John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community (Yale University Press), was published just months before Greenberg’s book. That these two prominent historians would simultaneously write books about the same man is testament both to Lewis’s importance in American life and to the absence of a comprehensive biography about him. Jon Meacham’s recent book, His Truth is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope (Random House, 2020), is an appreciative chronicle of the civil rights years; Meacham ends his story in 1968. Meacham makes the powerful claim that Lewis was “as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America” as were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others to the founding of the Republic. In addition, Lewis himself wrote a wonderfully rich autobiography, with Michael D’Orso, entitled Walking with the Wind (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
As for Greenberg and Arsenault, the arcs of their biographies are similar. They follow Lewis’s extraordinary life, from his upbringing in rural Alabama to his decades in the House of Representatives. The story gathers steam during Lewis’s college years at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he became immersed in the theory and practice of nonviolent resistance. Both authors emphasize the decisive influence of James Lawson, who led workshops on nonviolence and readied the Nashville students to protest segregation. From the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins to the Selma march, Lewis earned a reputation not only for his courage and bravery in the face of horrific violence, but also for his modest affect and for a moral compass that tracked true. He clung dearly to the tenets of nonviolence and interracialism, even amid the rise of Black Power. He worked for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968, then moved to Atlanta during the 1970s. He eventually won a seat on the city council, where he absorbed important lessons about the bare-knuckled world of municipal politics—lessons he would apply to his congressional campaign in 1986. The Democratic primary pitted Lewis against Julian Bond, his longtime friend and ally in the struggle.
If Greenberg and Arsenault tell stories that are almost identical, they employ very different frames of reference. Greenberg advances no specific argument about Lewis and the civil rights movement, but his angle is implicit in the book’s structure. Part One is titled “Protest”; Part Two is “Politics.” John Lewis followed Bayard Rustin’s famous directive, proposed after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, that the movement must transition from protest to politics. Greenberg breaks his book down that way as well.
Arsenault, of the University of South Florida, makes a more explicit argument. He centers his book around the concept of the “Beloved Community,” which was Lewis’s “chosen social and moral ideal.” For Lewis, as for Martin Luther King Jr.—who also made frequent use of the term—the Beloved Community operated as both “a philosophical theory and a call to service.” It was “a vision of love, peace, and unity” that stood as an aspiration to “oppressed people and their champions.” It applied to Gandhi’s India and to the American South. The goal was a land where love, peace, justice and democracy reigned, although both Lewis and King understood how difficult it would be to achieve. For Arsenault, it was Lewis’s quest for the Beloved Community that guided his six decades in public life. This goal helped Lewis remain undaunted in the face of terrifying violence. It allowed him to treat his tormentors with love and forgiveness, instilling in him qualities which could strike an outsider as almost superhuman. “If there was one element that set him apart from his peers,” Arsenault writes, “it was his incomparably strong sense of mission.”
Hosea Williams stared down at the Alabama River and then turned to Lewis. Williams asked: “Can you swim?” Lewis said no. “Neither can I,” replied Williams. “But we might have to.” The troopers charged.
While Arsenault provides a guiding principle to help anchor Lewis’s life and career, Greenberg offers absorbing accounts of many crucial events while presenting fuller portraits of other key individuals. The strength of Greenberg’s book is not its argument or analysis, but the way Greenberg provides revelatory details while recounting epic events. Many of these gems come from the author’s own interviews, with hundreds of activists and politicians.
For example, Greenberg gives a riveting portrait of the 1986 congressional contest between Lewis and Bond. The two men had a friendship that went back to their days in SNCC, and their families had remained close. The bruising campaign would fray that friendship. Lewis and Bond were a study in contrasts. Bond was debonair and charismatic. Lewis could come off as rumpled, and speaking in public he sometimes struggled to overcome a speech impediment—to say nothing of his rural Alabama accent. Lewis drove a Chevrolet, Greenberg reports, “when he drove at all.” Bond drove a Peugeot. At the beginning of the campaign, nobody gave Lewis a chance.
Bond, a state senator at the time, collected a slew of high-profile endorsements, including that of Ted Kennedy. Coretta Scott King “professed impartiality,” but she campaigned with Bond. In a large field of candidates, he seemed poised to win the primary in a walk. Early polls gave him a 30-point lead. Lewis was undeterred. He was determined to outwork Bond and hoped to force a runoff. (If no candidate collected 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-getters would advance to a runoff.) In this campaign, as in many others, Lewis’s wife, Lillian, would steel his resolve and stoke his ambition. Greenberg portrays her as a strong partner who dreamed big things for John Lewis and helped him to achieve them.
As Lewis knocked on doors throughout the district, he gave day laborers and maids as much attention as donors and elected officials. “For many Atlantans, Lewis’s simple upbringing and unassuming ways spoke to his decency, integrity, and authenticity,” Greenberg writes. Crucially, he canvassed white neighborhoods as well as Black, as he sought to build an interracial coalition. On the night of the primary, August 12, Bond gathered 47 percent of the vote; Lewis placed second with 35 percent. They headed to a runoff, to occur three weeks later.
Bond challenged Lewis to a series of debates. Bond thought he would easily outshine Lewis on the debate stage, but Lewis, who hired a speaking coach to prepare, more than held his own. The heated debates finally shattered a friendship that had been hanging by a thread. Late on election night, Bond clung to a four-point lead. Lewis’s campaign treasurer thought it was time for his concession speech. But a final batch of votes, from Buckhead and other northern suburban areas, gave Lewis 51 percent. He left his campaign headquarters and headed toward the Westin, where he had reserved a ballroom. Lewis walked more than a mile up Peachtree Avenue, with his family and campaign workers, to the hotel. As Greenberg writes, “people flooded into the streets to join them.” A quarter-century after Lewis had delivered a speech at the Lincoln Memorial, he returned to Washington, this time as a congressman.
In this campaign, as in many others, Lewis’s wife, Lillian, would steel his resolve and stoke his ambition. Greenberg portrays her as a strong partner who dreamed big things for John Lewis and helped him to achieve them.
Lewis would serve in the House of Representatives for thirty-three years. He worked on issues dear to his constituents and gained a national reputation as a defender of voting rights. As the decades passed, and the civil rights movement faded from memory to history, Lewis traveled to Selma every March to commemorate the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. These pilgrimages became an annual rite of passage for everyone from former activists to sitting politicians.
While both biographers provide absorbing depictions of Lewis’s extraordinary life, neither Greenberg nor Arsenault is able to step back and offer a view of how we ought to understand Lewis within the broader arc of American history. What does his life say about the civil rights movement and its contested legacy? How should we make sense of the fact that Lewis’s career bridged both protest and politics—and that he became an icon in both arenas? Does this make him unique in American history? One could credibly mount such an argument, and both books provide ample evidence to do so, yet both authors hold back.
In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, as the Republican Party began to tighten access to the ballot in several states. By the time of Donald Trump’s first presidency, it fell to Lewis and his allies in Congress to wage many more fights in the name of ensuring voting rights. When the Democrats took back control of the House in 2019, Lewis and his colleagues filed two expansive voting-rights bills. The first was a 600-page bill that guaranteed “almost unlimited access to the ballot,” Arsenault explains. House Democrats also filed a narrower bill, the Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the House in February 2019 but never made it to the Senate floor.
Several days after Christmas in 2019, Lewis announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He celebrated his eightieth birthday on February 21, 2020, just as Covid-19 began to sweep across the globe. Covid and cancer notwithstanding, Lewis made his way to Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in March, for the fifty-fifth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. James Lawson was there with him. So was Bernard Lafayette, a friend from his Nashville days, and Jesse Jackson, along with a whole roster of presidential hopefuls, like Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. It was Lewis’s last trip to Selma. It was also his last major public appearance. He died on July 17, 2020.
Lewis was memorialized in Washington, and in his hometown of Troy, Ala., then in Selma, and finally in Atlanta, at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. James Lawson delivered a eulogy, as Lewis had wished. Three former presidents spoke at the funeral service, including Barack Obama. In a spirited forty-minute speech, Obama placed Lewis’s life within the context of the long struggle for democracy. Obama summoned the ghosts of the Jim Crow South, when African Americans had to “guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot,” and lamented the efforts of those who were “attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.” Obama challenged the crowd. “Want to honor John?” he asked. “Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”
Even before the funeral, Lewis’s colleagues in the House had renamed one of its voting rights bills for Lewis. But nobody in the Democratic Party had any illusions about the bill’s prospects in the Senate. That the bill was named in his honor speaks to his legacy as one of the nation’s great champions of the right to vote. That it still languishes speaks to another, messier legacy: the civil rights movement transformed so much, yet the fundamental rights and freedoms of many Americans remain under threat.
Lewis did not live to see the most terrible attack on democracy in our nation’s history: the violent riot of Jan. 6, 2021. There is mercy in the fact that Lewis was spared from confronting this awful moment, yet misfortune in the reality that he is not here to guide us through. During his decades in Congress, Lewis amassed one thing that was so rare on Capitol Hill: moral authority. That is why his presence was so singular, and why his absence leaves such a gaping void. Lewis had lit the way forward in both protest and politics. In the coming struggle for American democracy, we will need new lights.