Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Notes on John Lewis

John Lewis died at the end of July and was laid to rest with the pomp and circumstance befitting a head of state. Eulogized by a former president, the only African American to attain the office. Praised by supporters and long-time opponents alike. Lewis was ripped from his own story. Made into something both more and less than what he was.

This — as Jeanne Theoharris writes in her book “A more Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History” — has been the American pattern in recent years, with politicians of both parties filtering the stories of the past through the lens of American exceptionalism. The story we tell ourself elides the ugly compromises that baked white supremacy into the American project and that continue to impose a heavy burden on Black Americans in the form of segregated housing and schools, and militarized policing.

The American mythology on race and the civil rights movement, as Theoharris points out, has a couple of threads. One what she calls the “almost-there, 10-percent-to-go idea,” which “acknowledged the history of racism but then simultaneously claimed that America had now largely moved past it” (Theoharris, p. xiii).

More damaging, Theoharris writes, is the way “iconization” of movement leaders like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the “erasure” of most other participants was used to “suggest that Americans, particularly young people of color today, could not do what these civil rights heroes and heroines did.” The effect, she says, is to “diminish contemporary efforts,” like Black Lives Matter as somehow outside of the tradition of “good trouble” that John Lewis himself embodied.

Obama, in his mostly on-point eulogy of Lewis, engages in some of this mythologizing, describing the United States as “a constant work in progress.” This implies that the founders saw the race issue through the same lens we use today, that there has been an inevitability to the progress that we have made. The nation, Obama said, was “born with instructions: to form a more perfect union. Explicit in those words is the idea that we are imperfect; that what gives each new generation purpose is to take up the unfinished work of the last and carry it further than anyone might have thought possible.”

He described Lewis as a fighter who “would do everything he could to preserve this democracy,” though the Civil Rights movement was not about preservation at all. It was about expansion. It was about dismantling not just the legal edifices of Jim Crow in the South but the extra-legal segregation that existed in the North — and that still exists throughout this nation. It was about demanding justice and liberty, demanding full participation in all facets of American civic life.

Obama’s eulogy captured the spirit of Lewis’ work, which also encompassed three decades in the US House of Representatives, but it still seemed to diminish the work of the earlier movement and question some of the aggressiveness of the current activists

“Like John, we have got to keep getting into that good trouble,” Obama said. “He knew that nonviolent protest is patriotic; a way to raise public awareness, put a spotlight on injustice, and make the powers that be uncomfortable.”

It wasn’t about discomfort but, as King wrote in “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” about “tension” that forces power to “confront the issue,” the injustice. Direct action “seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” This is more than raising public awareness, and it is why the thousands have taken to the streets during a pandemic to demand an end to police violence and the car real state.

Obama was just one of numerous politicians to weigh in. Mitch McConnell, for instance, offered a disingenuous commemoration — disingenuous because McConnell’s every action in the Senate, most recently as majority leader, has stood in opposition to Lewis’ work.

Lewis was a hero. But he was just one of many heroes of that time. his memory needs too be linked to all of the others who have worked and are working to cure the America of the disease of white supremacy that is embedded in the American system.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Patreon Newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2020

Populist.com