A 'down payment on the dream'

[1]

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.”

Until recently, the 68-year-old Georgia congressman could relive the past by just looking out his window, the view from which stretches straight from the Hill to Lincoln’s enthroned likeness. Today, however, history has been supplanted by the future — an enormous American flag, hung on the Capitol’s exterior for Barack Obama’s swearing-in, fills the frame with stars and stripes instead.

The Inauguration of the first African-American president comes just one day after the national celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And for those, like Lewis, who were there in ’63, the throngs on the Mall will inevitably recall the record crowds that gathered with King and other civil rights leaders for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Only this time, the march will end at the White House.

On that late summer day, more than 250,000 people took the one-mile trek from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial — where King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech — to demand fair pay, voting rights and social justice for Southern blacks.

At just 23, Lewis was the youngest speaker there.

“I remember that day, when we stood there, because it was a very hot, sunny Aug. 28,” he says. “And you saw these young people — some up in trees to get a better view, and then there were others with their feet in the water, just trying to cool off. Black and white.”

He was introduced by “the dean of black leadership,” A. Philip Randolph, as “young John Lewis, the national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.”

Then, he recalls, “I stood up, I looked straight ahead down the Mall and saw this sea of humanity.”

When Lewis talks about that era, his body seems to recall the moment; he narrows his eyes as he remembers looking out at the crowd that day, as if he sees it still.

It is the same when he talks about the Obama campaign; he raises his hand in a loose fist when he talks about campaign workers knocking on doors to get out the vote — their experiences are part of his experience, their work his work, their struggle his struggle.

“I think that campaign, more than anything that I’ve seen since the 1960s, was akin to the civil rights movement,” he says. “To see hundreds of thousands of people volunteering; seeing young people taking a semester, or in some cases taking an entire school year, and people leaving their jobs ... ” He trails off in wonder.

The sense that the Obama campaign was becoming something of a movement itself led Lewis, who was a Democratic superdelegate, to rescind his initial endorsement of longtime friend Hillary Clinton and throw his support behind the candidate from Illinois — who was a close-enough acquaintance to feature in a framed office photo from Lewis’ 65th birthday party in 2005.

In explaining his decision, Lewis noted that his district overwhelmingly supported Obama but also added: “Something’s happening in America, something some of us did not see coming. Barack Obama has tapped into something that is extraordinary.”

For Lewis, perhaps the most compelling link between Obama’s Inauguration and the civil rights movement is the struggle for voting rights, in which the Georgia congressman played a major role. Lewis led — and was badly beaten during — the 1965 Selma march that ended in the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation with Alabama state troopers, who attacked the crowd with tear gas, bullwhips and nightsticks and trampled them with their horses.

“One of the things I’ve been reflecting on since the election,” he says, “is the number of individuals who stood in those unmovable lines in Alabama and Mississippi and other parts of the South, just trying to pass a so-called literacy test” — which was required to go to the polls in those days. “Just daring, literally putting their bodies on the line, to attempt to register to vote.”

The Selma march led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — without which, Lewis says, “Barack wouldn’t be president.” He notes that, before the legislation, there were few blacks registered in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi — three states Obama carried in the primary, along with Virginia and North Carolina, which he also carried in the general election.

While the Voting Rights Act was a major leap forward, it was not the end of the battle. Lewis also spent seven years as the director of the Voter Education Project, which added some 4 million minority voters to the rolls, and he has continued to battle voter discrimination and intimidation as a member of Congress.
Nor will today’s Inauguration, however sweet the moment, mark the end of the struggle for Lewis.

“I’ve been saying during the past day or so that the election of Barack Obama is a major down payment on the dream. The dream is not paid in full,” he says. “There’s still work to do. We’ve come a distance, we’ve made progress, but we still have a distance to go.

“So after the shouts of joy and hallelujah and being on the mountaintop, we’ve got to come down to the valley, as Dr. King has said, and do the heavy lifting, do the necessary work.”

But for this day, at least, Lewis plans simply to take in the moment.

“Some of my colleagues are saying, ‘What are we going to do with all these people coming in here? We don’t have tickets, what are we going to do?’ I say, ‘Tell people to come. They want to come, let them come. Embrace it. Embrace this moment. Enjoy. It’s a wonderful example of the very best of our democracy. To see an orderly transfer of power.’”

A few days after the election, he recalls, someone said, “You cried so much during the night of the election — what are you going to do when Barack Obama stands to take the oath of office?

“But I’ll probably cry before he takes the oath of office,” Lewis says. “Because it’s going to be too much. Because my mind will reflect. It will go back to that day, Aug. 28, 1963, when we saw that sea of humanity.”