New Take on Civil Rights Icon John Lewis

We may think we’ve read and heard—not to mention watched, if we were fortunate—everything about John Lewis. Jon Meacham, no slouch as an historian, wrote the most recent biography of the man considered second to Martin Luther King as the most influential leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis sat in, he spoke up, he marched, he mattered.

But now comes “John Lewis” A Life,” written by David Greenberg. A resident of New York, Greenberg is currently, a professor at Rutgers. He has had a long and prestigious career as a journalist and historian. Just published by Simon and Schuster, there are more than 500 pages of facts, interviews, and newly discovered FBI documents and files. The book is already being praised, even by folks like Meacham, who blurbs that it “should be read by all who care about America’s democracy past, present and future.”

I decided to go to the source himself to find out why he spent so much time and space to remind us about a man whose entire life was about making a difference: concluding with elective office, where he was called “The Conscience of the Congress.”

What drew you to this one?

I began thinking about writing this book in 2018. It was in the middle of the Trump presidency, and I kept seeing John Lewis pop up in the news. I discovered that no one had ever written a biography of him. Here was someone, in contrast to Trump, who stood for the best of our American political traditions and values—who believed in and fought for democracy, equality, and freedom. At a moment when everyone was focused on the dark side of our politics and society, here was an opportunity to explore someone who represented the opposite.

Obviously others have written about him. including Jon Meacham. Does that make this more challenging ? What makes yours different?

Not really. Jon Meacham’s book is wonderful and we are lucky to have it. But he would be the first to agree that he did not intend it to be a full-scale biography. It more or less ends in 1968. John Lewis’s own memoir is also a great book, but it is inevitably a subjective account. A biography is inherently different from an autobiography. In fact, one of the joys of writing this book was that there wasn’t a shelf of books within which I had to situate mine. I was mapping out and documenting much of his life for the first time.

What will be surprises here for the reader? And, in fact, were for you?

There were so many surprises, I can’t even begin to list them all. For example, I don’t think most people know that John Lewis was an avid and knowledgeable collector of African-American art, who built an amazing collection and saw art as an important way to tell the African-American story. I learned, too, a lot about his early years in the movement—just how committed and tireless he was as chairman of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), to the point where his friends feared he would be hospitalized from exhaustion. Maybe most significantly, he turned out to be a much more political person than is generally assumed—a man of principle, yes, but also someone who could go negative in a campaign, tailor his words to a particular situation, and cut a compromise deal in order to further his goals.

He is no longer with us, of course. But any thoughts about what he would think of this election?

You can never say what someone who’s no longer with us would think about something he did not speak about. People change over time. But Lewis did express himself a lot about Donald Trump, and he made no secret that he considered Trump a racist and a xenophobe. He told me that the worst experience of the Trump presidency was seeing immigrant kids, separated from their parents, being housed in barracks in Florida. And we also know that he considered Kamala Harris an honorable colleague. He never believed you should vote on the basis of skin color, but he was excited beyond belief when Obama was elected; he desperately wanted Hillary Clinton to become the first female president; and he surely would be out there campaigning his heart out for Harris. He always said, “Vote like you’ve never voted before.”

I’m curious. Do your students know much about him?

Some do, some don’t. But he is for many a heroic and inspiring figure.

Did you ever meet Lewis?

We met at the start of my project. I wanted his blessing to write the book, and I flew to Atlanta to meet with him. His office was like a museum. Every inch of shelf space was covered with awards, plaques, and honors. Civil rights memorabilia and campaign photographs were all over the walls. He was soft-spoken and generous, promising he would support the book while agreeing that I would have full editorial control. I wish I’d had more opportunities to meet with him. But he discovered several months later that he had advanced cancer, and then we had Covid, so at that point we did only phone interviews. Fortunately, historians are trained to draw on multiple sources, and I was able to find very detailed oral histories that Lewis gave years ago—which told me far more, and in much greater detail, than I would have gotten even from direct interviews with him.

Thank you for your time, your thoughts, and for this important book. About a man we should never be able to forget.

Michele Willens is the author of “From Mouseketeers to Menopause.”