The fight for civil rights and freedom John Lewis and Bryan Stevenson
Transcriber: Joseph Geni
Reviewer: Camille Martínez
(Music)
(Voice-over) John Lewis:
My friends, let us not forget
that we are involved in a serious
social revolution.
We want our freedom, and we want it now.
(Voice-over) JL: When you see something
that is not right or fair or just,
you have to say something,
you have to do something.
(Voice-over) JL: It doesn’t matter
whether you’re Black or white,
we’re one people and one family.
(Cheers)
(Voice-over) JL: One person
with a dream, with a vision,
can change things.
Bryan Stevenson:
When people talk about you,
what do you want them to say?
[TED Legacy Project]
[Congressman John Lewis
In conversation with Bryan Stevenson]
BS: Well, this is such a great honor
for me to be in this room with you,
to have this conversation.
I can’t tell you what it means to me
to have this opportunity.
You represent something so precious
to so many of us,
and I just wanted to start
by thanking you for that,
for your willingness to wrap
your arms around people like me
and to make me think that it’s possible
to do difficult things,
important things.
And I just want to start
by asking you to talk a little bit
about that experience
of growing up in rural Alabama
in the Black Belt of America
and how that cultivated this spirit
that shaped your life and your vision.
I mean, you used to have to pick cotton
on your family’s farm.
JL: When I used to fuss as a young child,
I would complain, “Why this? Why that?”
And my mother would say,
“Boy, it’s the only thing we can do.”
She said, “I know it’s hard work,
but what are we going to do?
We have to make a living.”
But I was hoping
and almost praying for that day
when people wouldn’t have to work
so hard in the hot sun.
She was hoping also
that things would be better,
much better for us as a people
and for my family.
My mother, she was always thinking ahead.
If we’d get up early and go and pick
as much cotton as we could,
we would get more money,
because she knew the cotton
would be heavier
‘cause the dew would be on it.
So when it was weighed,
money would be increased.
BS: Your mother sounds really strategic.
JL: My dear mother,
one day, she came across
a little newspaper in downtown Troy
that said something about
a school in Nashville, Tennessee,
that Black students could attend.
BS: She encouraged you to apply for that,
even though that meant you’d be leaving
the house, you’d be leaving the farm,
you would not be contributing
that extra labor.
JL: Well, I was prepared and willing to go
to try to do what my folks
called “doing better,”
to get an education.
But in the beginning,
I wanted to attend Troy State.
BS: You wanted to desegregate Troy State.
JL: I submitted my application,
my high school transcript.
I never heard a word from the school.
So I wrote a letter to Dr. King.
I didn’t tell my mother, my father,
any of my sisters or brothers,
any of my teachers.
I told him I needed his help.
He wrote me back
and sent me a round trip
Greyhound bus ticket
and invited me to come
to Montgomery to meet with him.
And I can never, ever forget it.
BS: You knew about Dr. King
even before the boycott.
You had heard his sermon
the Apostle “[Paul’s Letter]
to American Christians.”
It’s the speech he gives
to all the people in Montgomery
four days after Rosa Parks
has been arrested.
At the end of the speech, he says,
one day, they’re going to tell a story
about a group of people
in Montgomery, Alabama.
And then he says, of Black people
who stood up for their rights,
and when they stood up for their rights,
the whole world changed.
And you had an immediate response
to that call to action.
JL: That message really appealed to me.
BS: Yeah.
JL: It was sort of
a social gospel message.
BS: Yeah.
JL: I wanted to do what I could
to make things better,
‘cause when you see something
that is not right or fair or just,
you have to say something.
You have to do something.
It’s like a fire burning up in your bones,
and you cannot be silenced.
BS: That’s right.
JL: My mother would have said to me,
“Boy, don’t get in trouble.
Don’t get in trouble.
You can get hurt, you can get killed.”
Dr. King and Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon
and others that I read about at that time
and later met,
inspired me to get in
what I call “good trouble,”
necessary trouble.
And I’ve been getting
in trouble ever since –
the sit-ins, the Freedom Ride …
BS: You went to Nashville
and began the work
of learning nonviolence.
When did nonviolence become
an essential part of your worldview
and the theology and the activism
that you wanted to create?
JL: Growing up, I wanted to be a minister.
I felt that what Dr. King
was saying in his speeches
was in keeping with the teaching of Jesus.
So I readily accepted this idea –
BS: Yeah. Yeah.
JL: … of nonviolence, the philosophy
and the discipline of nonviolence.
We were taught to respect
the dignity and the worth
of every human being
and never give up on anyone;
to try to reach them with kindness,
with hope and faith and love.
So you may beat me,
you may arrest me and throw me in jail,
but I’m not going to engage in violence.
I’m going to respect you as a human being.
BS: And I’m wondering whether
that is what gave you the courage
to endure some of that brutality.
Because a lot of people
talk about nonviolence.
They talk about the theology of love.
But when you’re on a bus
in Anniston, Alabama,
or in Montgomery, Alabama, as you’ve been,
surrounded by that mob
and surrounded by that hate,
surrounded by people who you know
are prepared to do violent things,
it’s a different dynamic.
JL: Yeah. I accepted that.
Dr. King taught us to love.
It’s in keeping with my Christian faith
to love everybody
and never hate,
because the hate was
too heavy a burden to bear.
BS: But it seems like
you were strategic, too.
You all thought a lot about
when and where to go someplace.
It wasn’t just, “Oh, here’s
an opportunity here, let’s just do it.
JL: We just didn’t jump up one day
and decide that we would go to Selma.
We checked places out.
Wherever there was
a possibility of leadership,
of creating a viral organization,
whether you had students,
people who were prepared
to get out and work and organize.
And that’s what we did.
We did everything that we could
to bring attention
to a situation that was
not good for people
and then we could organize people.
There were religious leaders
teachers and lawyers and others
in these communities and neighborhoods.
There would come a time
through the training
and accepting nonviolence,
the philosophy as a way of living,
as a way of life,
that you become prepared.
BS: It was a lot of rigorous training
to be prepared to be in
those very stressful situations
and maintain that commitment
to nonviolence,
and I don’t think people appreciate
how much work went into
preparing people for that.
JL: Well, it was something
that we became committed to,
a chance to go through role playing,
social drama,
pretending that you were beating someone
or knocking someone down,
someone’s blowing smoke in your face
and calling you all types of names,
training people how to be disciplined
and not giving up.
On the Freedom Rides in May of 1961,
when I was 21 years old,
leaving Washington, DC, for the first time
to go on the Freedom Ride –
I thought we were going to die.
As a matter of fact,
I thought I saw death,
but I believe God Almighty
kept me here for a reason.
BS: It’s a powerful, powerful testimony,
the picture of you,
and your head is bloodied,
this willingness to get
back on a bus to do it again.
And they interviewed you
after some of the sit-ins,
and what was interesting to me
about the way you talked about it
is you were very clear.
You said, we’re not just trying to do this
for the Black people in Nashville.
We’re trying to do this for everybody,
because they may not realize it yet,
but what they’re doing is wrong,
and I wouldn’t be the Christian
that I claim to be,
I wouldn’t be the good person
that I claimed to be,
if I didn’t try to help them
get past this wrong thing they’re doing.
I think people want redemption.
Our faith tradition,
we understand the power of redemption.
We preach about it,
and we understand that
there has to be confession,
there has to be repentance.
But collectively, as a society,
we haven’t really embraced that
in this country.
We haven’t really wanted to acknowledge
the legacy of slavery
and the history of lynching
and segregation.
People want to skip over the apology part,
and you still see these Confederate flags
and these symbols of resistance.
It seems to me part of what
is so urgent right now
is that we get people
to have the courage to say,
“You know, this was wrong,
and we have to reject that.”
But you have seen that redemption
in ways that I think has been
so extraordinary.
JL: A few short years ago,
one of the members of the Klan
who beat me and beat my seatmate,
in a little town
called Rock Hill, South Carolina,
left us lying in a pool of blood …
Many years later,
one member of the Klan
and his son
came to my office in Washington,
and he said, “I’ve been
a member of the Klan.
I’m one of the people
that beat you and left you bloody.
I want to apologize.”
His son started crying,
then he started crying.
He came up with his son to hug me.
I hugged them back,
and I saw this gentleman
three other times.
It’s the power of the way
of love, of forgiveness,
to admit it and say,
“I’m changed,” and move on.
BS: It does seem to me
that if we can show people
that on the other side of repentance,
on the other side of confession,
on the other side of acknowledgment,
there’s something beautiful,
like what you experienced
with that Klan member,
then maybe they’ll find their courage
to stand up and talk about
the wrongfulness of these things.
And I’ve been curious
how you would talk about what you learned
from your time with
Rosa Parks and Dr. King,
what they taught you,
what they left you with
that has allowed you
to do the work you’ve done.
JL: There’s something
about these individuals,
they touch me, they reach me.
If it hadn’t been for E.D. Nixon
or Rosa Parks,
Martin Luther King, Jr,
Reverend Ralph Abernathy
and so many others,
I don’t know what
would have happened to me.
I could have been lost.
But for Martin Luther King, Jr, to …
sent me a round trip
Greyhound bus ticket
and invited me to come
to Montgomery to meet with him,
my first Baptist church –
it’s impossible,
impossible
for a poor, barefooted boy
to dream that one day,
he would meet Martin Luther King, Jr.
I remember so well when he said,
“Are you the boy from Troy?
Are you John Lewis?”
And I said,
“Dr. King, I am John Robert Lewis.”
And he called me “the boy from Troy.”
“How is the boy from Troy doing?”
And sometimes, he would say things like,
“John, do you still preach?”
And I would say,
“Yes, Dr. King, when I’m taking
a shower so no one can hear me.”
BS: (Laughs)
JL: And he would laugh.
I think when he was assassinated,
when he died,
something died in all of us.
If he had lived –
he was a very young man –
maybe our country would be much better
and the world community
would be better off.
BS: We were talking earlier
about those critical moments,
1964, the passage of the Civil Rights Act,
the Voting Rights Act in 1965,
and it seems like our focus was on
ending the violations of rights
and less on remedying
this long history of violations
and what it would take to repair
all the damage that has been done.
And today I’m thinking,
in addition to no longer
denying Black people the right to vote,
maybe these states
should have done something reparational,
should have done something remedial.
They should have said, “You know what,
we’re going to automatically
register every Black person to vote.”
JL: The vote is the most powerful
nonviolent instrument or tool
that we have in a democratic society,
and we must make it easy
and simple for people to use it.
The people who gave
their very lives –
BS: Yes.
JL: … people who took
the beatings and suffered
so we have a right
to know what is in the food that we eat –
BS: Yes.
JL: … what is in the water we drink
or the air we breathe.
BS: You were the youngest speaker
at the March on Washington in 1963,
and you were very eloquent
and you were very compelling.
JL: I had worked on the speech
with some of the staffers
of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee,
but I was determined
to inspire young people,
another generation.
And when I looked out
and saw that sea of humanity,
I said to myself, “This is it.
I must go forward.”
I tell you,
it came together and we worked,
all of us, very hard
on getting the Lord’s cry out
on the Mall that day.
But it went so well,
the president, President Kennedy,
invited us down to the White House
after the march was over,
and he stood in the door
of the Oval Office greeting us
and beaming like a proud father,
and he kept saying to each one of us,
“You did a good job. You did a good job.”
And when he got to Dr. King, he said,
“You did a good job,
and you had a dream.”
That was my last time
seeing President Kennedy.
BS: Wow.
JL: I admired him.
BS: Yeah.
JL: There was something about the man
that was so inspiring.
BS: Yeah. Yeah.
You talked about how he and Robert Kennedy
were an influence to get into politics.
I know you first ran in the ’70s,
and then you ran again in the ’80s.
I’m curious – what motivated you
to make that shift?
JL: I saw in politics that you could
be a force for good.
So I was motivated to run for office,
and people started encouraging me,
“You should run for something.”
And I made a decision.
I don’t think I changed that much.
I think I’m the same sane person.
BS: (Laughs)
I said what I want to say
and, for the most part,
I do what I want to do.
I think you have to be a force for good –
BS: Yeah. Yeah.
JL: … to inspire people,
to encourage people.
BS: I was so moved when you organized
the protests around gun violence,
and I’m wondering how you think
we should be teaching people
what it means to be hopeful.
How do you think about communicating that
to both your colleagues in the Congress
and another generation of leaders?
JL: You may get down,
you may get knocked down,
but you get up.
You keep moving, you keep pressing on.
That was part of
the civil rights movement,
a new day, a better day was gonna come,
but we had to help that day come.
We couldn’t be quiet,
couldn’t be silent.
We have to be engaged
in creating a way out of no way.
BS: Do you think there are strategies
that we’ve abandoned
that we need to pick back up
to confront the issues
that we’re looking at today?
JL: I think there’s so many tactics
and techniques
that we’ve sort of abandoned
that we need to go back
and pick up these techniques and tactics
and use them.
We need to teach people,
especially our young people.
We talk to grade school students
and high school students
and college students
to learn to embrace the philosophy
and the discipline of nonviolence,
how to engage in nonviolent direct action.
We need it now more than ever before.
BS: I think you’ve brought into
our political culture
this spirit of activism,
this spirit of strategic protest,
a willingness to even
occasionally be disruptive.
You haven’t attended
all of the inaugurations of presidents
when you’ve felt like there were issues
around the legitimacy of those elections,
and I see a new generation of politicians
that seem to embrace some aspects of that,
and I’m wondering whether you think
that the kind of modeling you’ve done
is going to be part of your legacy
that’s important to you
as a politician.
JL: I’ve been so impressed
with this new breed
of young men and young women
that are coming into elected positions.
It’s not just at the national level
but also at the local level.
And I think we, now more than ever before,
need men and women of conscience
as judges,
especially on the federal level,
but also at the state and local level,
to say, “We’ve got to mend.
We’ve got to make up.”
BS: Yeah.
JL: And people don’t have
100 years to make up.
We need to do it and do it now.
BS: You’ve become somebody
who has had such an impact on the world.
When people talk about you
50 years from now, 100 years from now,
what do you want them to say?
How you want to be thought of,
how you want to be talked about?
JL: My hope – I don’t think
I would have much to say about it,
but it would be:
he tried to create a better society,
a better world,
helping to liberate and free people,
helping to save people
and move people to a different
and better sense of humanity.
BS: I have met people who worked with you.
There are so many whose names
have never really been known,
but I encounter them every now and then,
because I get to live in Alabama.
And I talk about a man I met
who was in a church.
I was giving a talk,
and he was in the back.
He was in a wheelchair,
and he was staring at me
the whole time I was giving this talk,
and he had this stern,
almost angry look on his face.
And when I finished my talk,
people came up.
They were very nice and appropriate,
but that older Black man
in a wheelchair just kept staring.
And then he finally
wheels himself to the front,
and when he came up to me, he said,
“Do you know what you were doing?”
And I just stood there.
And then he asked me again,
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
And I mumbled something.
I don’t even remember what I said.
And he asked me one last time,
“Do you know what you’re doing?
Because I’m going to tell you
what you’re doing.”
He said, “You’re beating
the drum for justice.
You keep beating the drum for justice.”
And I was so moved.
I was also relieved,
because I just didn’t know
what was about to happen.
But then he said, “Come here,
come here, come here.”
And he pulled me by my jacket,
and he pulled me down close to him,
and he turned his head, and he said,
“You see this scar I have
right here behind my right ear?
I got that scar in Greene
County, Alabama, in 1963,
working with C.T. Vivian.”
JL: Yeah, Greene County.
BS: Then he turned his head.
He said, “You see this cut down here?
I got that in Philadelphia, Mississippi
trying to register people to vote.”
And then he said, “You see this bruise?
That’s my dog spot.
I got that in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1965
during the Children’s Crusade.”
And then he said, “People look at me,
they think I’m some old man
covered with cuts and bruises and scars,
but I’m going to tell you something.
These are not my cuts.
These are not my bruises.
These are not my scars.”
He said, “These are my medals of honor.”
And I am sitting here sitting next to you,
and I still see the scars,
and I know that there are the bruises,
and I know that there are the cuts,
and yet you are still talking about
love and redemption and justice
and inspiring people like me.
And I just want you to know,
I don’t think there’s an American living
that is more honored,
more representative
of the great values of this nation,
of the hope of this nation,
than you,
and I just cannot tell you
how thrilled and privileged I am
to have this opportunity
and to have this opportunity to share,
and I want you to know
I am going to keep fighting.
A lot of us are going to keep fighting,
and you have caused us to believe
that we cannot rest until justice comes.
And I want you to thank you for that.
JL: Wish you well.
BS: Absolutely, my friend.
Absolutely. Bless you.
JL: OK. Bless you, brother.
BS: Thank you. Thank you.
[Congressman John Lewis
February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020]
[Rest in Peace]