John Lewis

Mitchell Atencio 8-25-2021

Dr. Deborah Turner of the League of Women Voters (LWV), Rabbi Jonah Pesner of Religious Action Network, Virginia Kase Solomón of LWV, Rev. Melvin Wilson of Saint Matthew AME Church, and Ben Jealous of People for the American Way lead a civil disobedience action during a voting rights rally at the White House. LWV, People for the American Way, Black Voters Matter, and many other organizations hosted the rally to pressure Congress and President Biden to protect voting rights after many states passed laws to make voting more difficult for minorities. Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via Reuters.

The House of Representatives passed HR 4, known as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advacement Act, 219-212, which faith leaders and other voting rights advocates believe is a crucial step in voter protection.

“Tireless hours by members of Congress and civil rights leaders have brought the issue of federally mandated voter suppression to the forefront of conversations around American democracy,” Rev. Al Sharpton said in a news release through March On For Voting Rights. “This is only the start of the fight to move farther and farther away from the Jim Crow Era.”

A photo from John Dear’s meeting with Rep. John Lewis in 1995. (John Dear/Waging Nonviolence)

This weekend marks the 56th anniversary of the Selma march.

Valerie Bridgeman 9-29-2020

Illustration by Jackson Joyce

AS WE COME to the end of the Christian liturgical year to enter Advent, these reflections are more on the character of God than on our human responsibilities to live into God’s reign. They evoke a sense of God’s care for God’s people as a continual reality from generation to generation.

What does it mean to reflect on the ways God has been with our ancestors and bring that reflection into our trust for God? How do we hold ourselves accountable to our history while reaching toward God’s future? If we believe that we are participants in the reconciliation of the world to wholeness, to God’s first and best intentions, then we will have to recommit ourselves to the promises we made to serve God.

It’s not always easy because there are so many other things, other “gods” if you will, to pull us away. The hymn writer confessed that he was “prone to wander, Lord I feel it.” Haven’t we all felt the inclination to leave the God of our ancestors, of our confession, of our hope? I certainly have. As we meditate over the texts for this month, I hope we also will reconsider our relationship with God and with one another. I hope we will be encouraged as we decide when and how to act as a part of our faith. The world needs us to be reflective and active in these times. God is calling us forward.

JOHN LEWIS died the week I read this book. No American alive in 2020 was a better witness to the courage of nonviolent civil disobedience than Lewis. Ironically, that same week “warriors” from the federal government descended, uninvited and unidentified, on Portland, Ore. Violence exploded. The Bible’s final book, Revelation, seems more relevant than ever.

Thomas B. Slater’s slim volume is not a typical commentary on the biblical book, analyzing all its chapters and decoding all its symbols. Instead, Slater focuses on the political situation of seven small house churches in Roman-dominated Asia Minor (now western Turkey), to whom John of Ephesus wrote (Revelation 2-3). These believers lived in cities where temples or shrines represented the imperial cult, and all subjects were expected to offer sacrifices to the current “divine” emperor.

9-21-2020

Voter suppression is a rampant practice in our nation's elections. Here's what we can do to fight it.

Mourners of the late Rep. John Lewis, a pioneer of the civil rights movement and long-time member of the U.S. House of Representatives, hold a vigil in his memory in Atlanta, uly 19, 2020. REUTERS/Lynsey Weatherspoon/File Photo

For many today, the Black freedom struggle has become a myth. Our ancestors are memorialized in their death while crucified in their life. For many, it has become a symbol of progress: a symbol of the progress of America, particularly white America, to finally “get it.” It is a powerful myth. 

President Donald Trump speaks to the news media at the White House, July 29, 2020. REUTERS/Leah Millis

This morning President Trump posted the following unconscionable tweet regarding our upcoming election that dishonors Congressman Lewis’ legacy and poses a direct threat to our democracy:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) waits in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda to enter memorial services for Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) as a group in Washington, Oct. 24, 2019. Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Pool via Reuters/File Photo

I spent many hours just looking at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The words that kept coming to me were “courage” and “gratitude,” and the question that surfaced was: What bridge we will now have to cross?

the Web Editors 7-18-2020

Congressman John Lewis addresses supporters of Democrat Jon Ossoff as they wait for the poll numbers to come in for Georgia's 6th Congressional District special election in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., June 20, 2017. REUTERS/Chris Aluka Berry

Civil rights leader and long-time member of the U.S. House of Representatives John Lewis died on Friday at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

John Lewis with fellow protestors at Edmund Pettus Bridge, in JOHN LEWIS: GOOD TROUBLE, a Magnolia Pictures release. © Alabama Department of Archies and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Tom Lankford, Birmingham News. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Good Trouble is a timely and deeply moving film, particularly in this moment of national awakening and reckoning around police violence and systemic racism, and as we approach what feels like the most consequential election in my lifetime.

the Web Editors 1-14-2017

On Jan. 13, Georgia Rep. John Lewis — civil rights icon who was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., marching for voting rights for African Americans in 1965 — said he would not be attending President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration, a first for the longtime congressman since serving. Trump took to Twitter the morning on Jan. 14 to attack Lewis. 

Da’Shawn Mosley 10-03-2016

Da'Shawn Mosley/Sojourners

So there was a gloom and reverence with which I walked through the first three levels of the museum, and with which many of the people around me also seemed to travel. We were in the presence of ruins from days when black bodies were treated like cattle and felled like sugar cane crops. We were staring at the adornments of Ku Klux Klan members, at shards of glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church, and we were doing so only days after yet another police shooting of yet another unarmed black man. Death was in the air, and we were the bereaved.

the Web Editors 9-08-2016

Screenshot via The Late Show with Stephen Colbert/YouTube

Rep. John Lewis — civil rights leader, gun legislation sit-in organizer, graphic novelist ... crowd surfer.

"Sometimes you have to find a way to get into trouble — good trouble, necessary trouble," Lewis said on a recent segment of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert shortly before diving off the stage, at Colbert's encouragement.

the Web Editors 8-17-2015

Julian Bond. Image via /Shutterstock

Julian Bond, prominent civil rights activist in the 1960s and later chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., died Saturday night at the age of 75, The New York Times reports.

Mr. Bond embodied many roles in his life, including "writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer and college teacher," and remained a prominent spokesperson for justice causes — including as part of the Fast for Families for immigration reform, alongside Sojourners — until his death.

Jim Wallis 3-12-2015
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

President Obama hugs Rep. John Lewis in front of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

The Edmund Pettus Bridge was named after a Confederate general who became a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan. His name, still emblazoned over the top of that now famous bridge, was a powerful and threatening symbol of white power and supremacy in Selma, Ala. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had at one time removed Selma from their list of places to organize because “the white folks were too mean, and black folks were too afraid."

But that didn’t deter a group of courageous African Americans from marching across that bridge a half-century ago, risking their lives for the right to vote in America. They were attacked and beaten by the fierce forces, led by notorious Sheriff Jim Clark, for their resistance to the frightening violence of white power.

Last Saturday, during the 50th anniversary event of “Bloody Sunday,” I spent many hours just looking at that bridge. The words that kept coming to me were “courage” and “resistance.” My question became: what bridge we will now have to cross?

Congressman John Lewis, whose skull was cracked that day as a young man, opened the main event.

"On that day, 600 people marched into history … We were beaten, tear gassed, some of us [were] left bloody right here on this bridge. … But we never became bitter or hostile. We kept believing that the truth we stood for would have the final say.”

Then Lewis introduced the president, "If someone had told me, when we were crossing this bridge, that one day I would be back here introducing the first African-American president, I would have said you're crazy.”

What happened on this bridge, President Barack Obama said, “was a contest to determine the meaning of America,” and where “the idea of a just America, a fair America, an inclusive America, a generous America … ultimately triumphed.”

Historic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., loneroc / Shutterstock.com

Historic Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., loneroc / Shutterstock.com

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ - John 2:15,16

This is one of the most important stories in the life of Jesus. So important, that it’s one of a handful of stories that all four Gospel writers actually all share.

Even though they remember it differently.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke — they recall that this episode where Jesus entered the Temple grounds and stirred stuff up once and for all — they remember it near the end of his life. They place it as one of the main reasons that Jesus is arrested and put to death as a capitol offense against the Roman Empire.

Walking into the Temple — run by the Jewish religious elite who had been put in place by the Roman imperial oppressors — was tantamount into walking into a federal government building and blowing it up.

Except Jesus doesn’t do that. Jesus is a pacifist. Jesus is a prophet.

Terry W Ryder / Shutterstock.com

Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., site of Bloody Sunday. Terry W Ryder / Shutterstock.com

The journey to end systems of injustice begins with a single step. This theme resonates throughout the recently released film Selma, which recounts the events leading up to the famous Selma-to-Montgomery march. Led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this march catalyzed the full enfranchisement of people of color through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Voting Rights Act is considered to be one of the most successful achievements of the civil rights movement. But 50 years later, the residue of Jim Crow laws that banned people of color from voting lingers today in a new, subtle form: disenfranchisement laws for people with felony convictions.

Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, examines how these laws strip minority communities of their voice in the public sphere because of the disproportionately high percentage of racial minorities “swept into” America’s mass incarceration system.

Jim Wallis 1-08-2015

David Oyelowo plays Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 'Selma.' Photo courtesy Selma Movie on Facebook.

“I do know the voice of God.”

That’s what David Oyelowo, the actor who beautifully portrays Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the new film Selma, told me last night. It’s that voice, he said, that called him to play the role.

I was at the December preview of Selma in Washington, D.C., and then took my family to see it at an early showing on Christmas day. I sometimes respond emotionally to films, but Selma made we weep. It also made me grateful that for the first time in 50 years, a big studio had finally made a film about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the people in the movement around him in Selma. I believe this movie, unlike most others, could actually change the nation’s conversation about race and reconciliation at a crucial time, perhaps even providentially.

On the premiere night, I met David Oyelowo, who spoke publically after the film about his faith. I don’t hear that kind of talk very much in D.C., but David was open and forthright, saying that playing the great Christian leader became part of his personal calling as a Christian.

In our conversation afterward, I asked David what he meant by those words. His answer prompted me to ask for an interview with him before the film, which debuts this weekend, came out. He and I talked last night (listen to the full interview below).

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama pose for a photo with the fasters. Photo via RNS, courtesy Fast for Families

Sapped by three weeks of a water-only diet, three activists for immigration reform ended their fasts Tuesday with a morsel of bread blessed by a priest and “passed the fast on” to others who hope to keep attention focused on the issue.

“You have truly put your faith in action,” said retired Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, one in a small crowd of political and clerical dignitaries who came to the National Mall to praise those who have gone without food in a bid to pressure Republican House leaders to pass an immigration reform bill.

Also seated alongside the quiet and wan fasters: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; the Rev. Bernice King, the daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; Secretary of Labor Tom Perez; Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.; and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

In recent weeks, the fasters have attracted high-profile visitors, including President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden, to the heated tents where the fasters have been living on the National Mall.