Once again, the voters of Georgia’s 5th Congressional District have been good to me and I will go back to Washington to work for them.
I have been involved in a lot of campaigns. I have never, ever had a group of volunteers, more committed, more dedicated, more supportive. I want to thank each and every one of you, those who got up early in the morning to stand on street corners waving signs, those who put on the blue and white t-shirt with the little red dot and wore them with a great sense of pride.
WASHINGTON — Elwin Wilson was an unabashed racist, the sort who once hung a black doll from a noose outside his home. John Lewis was a young civil rights leader bent on changing laws, if not hearts and minds, even if it cost him his life.
They faced each other at a South Carolina bus station during a protest in 1961. Wilson joined a white gang that jeered Lewis, attacked him and left him bloodied on the ground.
A couple of decades ago, when Barack Obama was on a break from Harvard Law School and visiting friends in Chicago, he carried around a copy of “Parting the Waters,” the first volume of Taylor Branch’s magnificent trilogy about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the rise of the civil-rights movement. Obama was staying with Jerry Kellman, his mentor during his three years as a community organizer on the South Side. Kellman said that he greatly admired Branch’s book. Obama brightened and said, “Yes, it’s my story.”
Mind reading is a decidedly low form of journalism. Yet it is not hard to imagine that as Obama emerged into the noonday light last Tuesday to receive the oath of office, as he left the Capitol’s warm interior and saw before him the carpet of humanity stretching down Capitol Hill to the monuments miles distant, that he made a mental leap to Marian Anderson’s defiant concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, to the March on Washington that King led twenty-four years later, to the entire story of a struggle that he was too young to join but came to claim as his own.
WASHINGTON - As lifetime awards go, U.S. Rep. John Lewis couldn't have received one at a better time.
Sunday night, the Atlanta Democrat received the Martin Luther King Jr. Drum Major Award for his work as a civil rights activist.
"I want to thank Dr. King for liberating me and for giving me something to stand up for," Lewis said. "We can all be drum majors for justice."
The honor came on the eve of the holiday honoring the award's namesake and two days before the nation seats its first African-American president.
When John Lewis looks out at the Mall on Inauguration Day, he’ll be remembering the day in August 1963 when the crowd on the national green faced the opposite direction.
“It’s almost like history ... fate ... time — whatever you want to call it — just coming together,” he says.
His eyes focus for a moment beyond the walls of his Capitol Hill office.
“It’s almost too much to contemplate.”
By RUSS RYMER
Op-Ed Contributor
JOHN McCAIN deplored them, Barack Obama distanced himself from them, but the comments that Representative John Lewis of Georgia delivered on Oct. 11 may turn out to be some of the most trenchant - and generous - of the campaign. Mr. Lewis charged Mr. McCain and Sarah Palin with "sowing the seeds of hatred and division" in their fervently red-meat rallies, not unlike "a governor of the State of Alabama named George Wallace" whose race-bating rhetoric, Mr. Lewis noted, contributed to the 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church in which four young girls were killed.
The context of Mr. Lewis's critique is not as has been presented: a saint of the civil rights movement likening a decorated war hero to an infamous racist. Rather, it was a collegial (if rough) caution from one brother to another, about a third, politicians all.
The following is the text of Rep. John Lewis' remarks at the Democratic National Convention on the historic Presidential Nomination of Barack Obama at Invesco Field in Denver, Colorado on August, 28, 2008:
On this day 45 years ago a son of America, a citizen of the world, a peaceful warrior, Martin Luther King Jr., stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said, “I have a dream today, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
He recalled that “when the architects of our republic, wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” they issued a call for justice. And they founded our democracy on a mandate for freedom, equality, and human dignity.
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