JOHN LEWIS

A comprehensive biography of the Civil Rights leader and legislator.

A telling anecdote comes early in Arsenault’s life of John Lewis (1940-2020), when he traveled to the Capitol to fundraise for a Freedom Rides Museum. Lewis kept the delegation waiting for an hour because he had promised to discuss Civil Rights history with a high school student from Ohio: “The day’s schedule had gotten backed up, but Lewis was not about to short-change the boy.” Though Lewis became a luminary late in life, his early years were marked by struggle: He was hounded as both a radical and an idealist, and he bore the scars to prove it. One perhaps surprising revelation is the significant divisions within the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. may be remembered as the iconic leader, but his leadership was heavily contested, and Lewis himself became alienated from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee over the phrase “Black Power.” Said Lewis, “As an organization we don’t believe in slogans. We believe in programs.” After the police riot at the Edmund Pettus Bridge—now meaningfully renamed the John Lewis Bridge—in Selma, Alabama, the movement turned away from Lewis’ message of peaceful resistance, but he kept pushing. As Arsenault writes, one reward for his ceaseless efforts was the election of Barack Obama, whom he supported after turning away from old ally Hillary Clinton because of her support of the Iraq War. At the end of his life, Lewis, always inclined to try to find the good in even his fiercest opponents, saw Civil Rights take a giant step backward with the election of Donald Trump: upon Lewis’ death, the “only major Republican officeholder to withhold praise for the man others mourned as an American hero.”

An exemplary biography of an exemplary person, essential to the history of the Civil Rights Movement.