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PORTSIDE CULTURE

JOHN LEWIS: A LIFE  
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Steve Nathans-Kelly
October 7, 2024
New York Journal of Books
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_ "More than any Lewis biography to date," writes reviewer
Nathans-Kelly, this book "captures that life’s complex, magnificent,
and underappreciated second act.” _

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_John Lewis
A Life_
David Greenberg
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13: 9781982142995

The first eight years of American civil rights icon John Lewis’s
public life loom so large in his legend that when he died at age 80 in
July 2020, the first biography published after his death, Jon
Meacham’s unabashedly hagiographic _His Truth Is Marching On_, made
little mention of Lewis’s life after 1968. But at the time of his
death, Lewis had been serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for
33 years and for much of that time had been heralded as “The
Conscience of the Congress.”

Even Lewis was well aware that two moments during his three-year
tenure as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC)—his controversial speech at the March on Washington in 1963
and the savage beating he took from Alabama state troopers on
Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge on the “Bloody Sunday” march for
voting rights—overshadowed a long lifetime of commitment, service,
and struggle. Though Lewis proved much more than a symbol from the
heroic civil rights years during his progression from protest to
politics that culminated in three distinguished decades in Congress,
he also returned to Selma every year and told the story of Bloody
Sunday countless times.

David Greenberg’s _John Lewis: A Life_, is not the first Lewis
biography to allocate substantial coverage to Lewis’s congressional
career; Raymond Arsenault’s _John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved
Community_, published in January 2024, also does an admirable job of
that. But Greenberg’s book is the first Lewis biography that really
takes a deep dive into the kind of congressman Lewis was, his
strengths and weaknesses as a legislator, the strong working
relationships he cultivated with the presidents under whom he served
and other key Democratic contemporaries like Nancy Pelosi and Steny
Hoyer, his energetic work across the aisle, and the remarkably
close-knit and effective staff he built.

Greenberg portrays Lewis as a legislative bridge-builder much more
similar to the Ted Kennedy of Neal Gabler’s _Catching the Wind _than
the bullying, cajoling, ruthless, and domineering Lyndon Johnson of
Robert Caro’s _Master of the Senate_. Greenberg’s Lewis is no
policy wonk, painstakingly dissecting the nuances of complex
legislation. But he also emerges as a high-principled legislator with
a strong party loyalty and an unwavering commitment to interracial
democracy and justice that stretched well beyond civil rights to
economic justice for the poor and particularly LGBTQ+ rights and AIDS
funding, dating back to his earliest years on the Hill.

“Lewis did, in time, get his share of legislation passed,”
Greenberg writes. “But as his colleague Barney Frank explained,
‘His role lay elsewhere.’”

Perhaps more than anything, in Greenberg’s telling, Lewis’s impact
on Congress demonstrated “that there was more than one way to be an
effective congressman. He found that the moral authority that he had
accrued from his civil rights years played extremely well in
Washington and with the media, especially when the subject was race.
His experience compelled people to listen when he spoke to the core
principles at stake in a policy debate. Conversely, jabs at a
political opponent, even the president, didn’t come across as quite
so partisan when launched by someone widely judged to be a hero or a
saint.”

Drawing on voluminous interviews with associates from every phase of
Lewis’s public and private life, Greenberg paints a richly detailed
and layered portrait of a man too often reduced to a symbol or a
reminder of an increasingly distant past. Jonathan Eig, whose landmark
Martin Luther King biography _King: A Life _was published in 2023,
contrasted his work to Pulitzer Prize-winning King books by David
Garrow and Taylor Branch by saying, “In some ways, my book is the
inverse of theirs. They’re telling a giant story with King at the
center of it. I’m telling King’s story with the giant story on the
periphery of it.” _John Lewis: A Life _arguably takes a similar
approach.

Greenberg’s book departs from previous Lewis biographies by homing
in on the personal and personal/political relationships in John
Lewis’s life, from SNCC colleagues like Julian Bond, Jim Forman,
Stokely Carmichael, Archie Allen, Danny Lyon, and Muriel Tillinghast,
to Lewis’s wife Lillian and son John-Miles, longtime congressional
staffers and colleagues like Nancy Pelosi, as well as Barack Obama,
and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Greenberg captures the dimensionality of
these relationships and chronicles their ups and downs and the
conflicts that painfully ruptured some (like Forman, Carmichael, and
Bond) and tested others (like Obama and the Clintons).

Greenberg supplies fresh insight into familiar subjects like Lewis’s
remarkable, evolving relationship with Robert Kennedy. He also sheds
new light on the often-dissected simmering tensions in SNCC between
Lewis’s seminarian contingent, which grew out of the Nashville
Student Movement and the 1961 Freedom Rides and carried unwavering
commitments to forging the Beloved Community and nonviolence as a way
of life, and the more militant faction personified by
“northerners” (as Lewis saw them) Jim Forman and Stokely
Carmichael, who regarded nonviolence as a means to an end. Those
tensions boiled over at SNCC’s May 1966 conference in Kingston
Springs, Tennessee, when a controversial re-vote on the chairmanship
(which Lewis and his allies considered a “coup”) ousted Lewis and
replaced him with Stokely Carmichael. In Greenberg’s telling,
Lewis’s dismissal as a relic of SNCC’s “too pious” first
generation feels both tragic and inevitable.

Bill Clinton’s eulogy at John Lewis’s 2020 funeral is mostly
remembered for its regrettably reductive and simplistic portrayal of
the post-Kingston Springs freedom struggle: “There were two or three
years there where the movement went a little too far towards Stokely,
but in the end, John Lewis prevailed.”

Greenberg offers another quote from Clinton’s remarks that paints
the eulogy in a much better light: “We are here today because
[Lewis] had the kind of character he showed when he lost an
election.”

At its best and most revealing, Greenberg’s book is about that
character, and the many new ways Lewis found to fight for his vision
of the Beloved Community after his first community shattered and
rejected him. More than any Lewis biography to date, _John Lewis: A
Life _captures that life’s complex, magnificent, and
underappreciated second act.

 

Steve Nathans-Kelly is a freelance writer and editor. Many of his book
reviews have appeared in online magazine _Paste_.

* John Lewis
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* The Civil Rights Movement
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* U.S. Congress
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* Politics
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* Nonviolence
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