By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Georgia Democratic Congressman and civil rights advocate John R. Lewis on Tuesday told students at a private school in Princeton to speak up when they see injustice in the same nonviolent way that he did a generation ago fighting racial discrimination.
“Be bold, be not afraid,” he said at the Hun School to an estimated 800 people at an assembly that included faculty and others. “But never, never ever hate. Hate is too heavy a burden to bear. The way of love, the way of peace is much better.”
From a platform, he stood inside a darkened gymnasium reflecting on a life spent at the center of the civil rights movement that many times saw him risk his freedom and his personal safety for his convictions. For roughly 21 minutes, he shared his reminiscences of growing up in rural Alabama, of joining the movement to end discrimination and of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — a man he called his “leader” and “friend.”
In a voice that rose and fell with the cadence of a preacher, Mr. Lewis described the ways he and other blacks encountered segregation.
A movie theater located near where he lived made black children sit in the balcony, while their white peers could sit on the first floor, he remembered. In 1956, he, his brothers, sisters and cousins were denied the right to borrow books from the county library, as a librarian at the time said the place was for whites only.
He said he never returned to that library until July 5, 1998, to sign copies of his book, after which he got a library card all those years later. “It says something about the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made,” Mr. Lewis said.
As a young man, he got to meet Mr. King. He said he admired and loved Mr. King, someone he viewed like a big brother.
In college at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, he and students from other colleges gathered each Tuesday at a church to study “the philosophy and discipline of non-violence.” The training kept him and other activists from meeting violence with violence when they would be abused when sitting at a lunch counter or in other encounters.
At one point in his remarks, he spoke of the virtues of civil disobedience, recalling the 40 times he had been arrested in the 1960s and five more times as a member of Congress representing Atlanta and parts of Georgia. He said he had gotten into trouble — “good trouble, necessary trouble.”
He said the day he was arrested in February 1960, “I felt free, I felt liberated and I felt like I crossed over.”
“Stand up, speak up and speak out,” he said later. “That’s what we did in the American civil rights movement. And we brought about a nonviolent revolution, a revolution of values, a revolution of ideas.”
Mr. Lewis, 75, has been in Congress since 1987. He is seen as one of the chamber’s most liberal members. In his remarks Tuesday, he mostly avoided hot-button issues of the day, although he touched on the debate over immigration.
“I don’t accept the idea that we have illegal human beings,” he said.
In response to a student’s question, he said today’s “Black Lives Matter” movement has taken a page from the civil rights movement of his day. The ability to organize through social media was not available in those times, he said.
Earlier in his remarks, he touched on the need for national unity.
“It doesn’t matter what part of the world that we come from. It doesn’t matter whether we are black or white, Latino, Asian-American or Native American,” he said. “We are one people. We’re one family. We’re one house. We all live in the same house, the American house, the world house.”
Mr. Lewis’ life has been turned into a series of graphic novels that he wrote with one of his congressional aides, Andrew Aydin, and which Hun students had to read over the summer. Mr. Aydin and Nate Powell, the illustrator of those books, joined the congressman at the school and also addressed the assembly.
