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.
