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There is a general impression, on the part of many, that the Sixties was a decade-long haze of drugs and free love. I can’t really say, since I was born in 1958. I know one person, however, who certainly did not experience it that way. That person is Congressman John Lewis.
John Lewis was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders, who challenged racial segregation on the buses in the South. He also was the Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
In 1961 and 1962, Lewis was arrested. Twenty-four times.
In Anniston, Alabama, Klan members deflated the tires of a bus that Lewis and the other Freedom Riders had boarded. Then they firebombed it.
In Birmingham, Lewis was beaten. In Rock Hill, South Carolina, two white men punched Lewis in the face, and kicked him in the ribs.
In Montgomery, a mob met the bus, took Lewis off the bus, knocked him over the head with a wooden crate, and left him unconscious on the bus station floor.
On one day in 1965, a day known as “Bloody Sunday,” Alabama state troopers in Selma hit civil rights demonstrators with tear gas, charged into them, and beat them with clubs. They broke John Lewis’s skull.
I’ve seen the scars on his head.
Somehow, all of that . . . pain . . . forged an outstanding Congressman. A champion on universal healthcare. A forceful proponent of gay rights. An apostle of peace.
This month, for only the second time in his 26 years in Congress, John Lewis faces a primary challenge. I don’t know who is running against him, and I don’t really care. Whoever he is, he has not earned the job the way that John Lewis has, and he can’t do the job the way that John Lewis does it.
I’m just glad that there are people like John Lewis in Congress.
I’m asking you to help re-elect this great man, and this great leader. You’ll feel good to help him, just as I feel good to know him. Click here.
Courage,
Alan Grayson
4 Comments
Thank you, Alan. I was born in 1959, but I remember “Bloody Sunday” because, of course, anyone who owned a television set during that time saw the daily onslaught of news and was duly riveted by what they saw. Trying to compare it to today is strange, sometimes it feels to me as though history is hyperventilating or something…
Anyway, I wish the best for Rep. Lewis, and I hope things got appropriately addressed and worked through re: Occupy Atlanta? Thanks.
So all those beating occupy protesters have received, amongst them military veterans, and also the arrests of several of them on charges of “terrorism”, of course under the aegis of a “Democrat” mayor, are for the improvement of their character, to make them better Americans? How benevolent of you and your vile, sold-out evil cronies in the Uniparty.
I was flipping channels and stopped when I saw the president shaking hands with some dignitaries after signing the “Student Loan Bill”. When he shook the hand of this last person, a look of awe and fear came across his face; although it was only for an instant, and I never saw anything but this person’s big black head, I’m sure it was John lewis.
President Barack Obama knows in his heart of hearts, that if it were not for people like John Lewis, there is no way under the Sun that he would be President of The United States of America.
kbki202, I forgive you for not understanding Alan Grayson’s post. Almost everybody that post’s is a member of the Democratic Party, we were all sold out, including John Lewis; and Barack Obama sold us out. The day after he was elected, he knew there was nothing we could do about whatever he did.