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Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, October 31st, and I'm Mark Ross, retired managing partner of Kwqc and president of the City Club Board of Directors.

I am excited to be here today marking the City Club's 113th Annual Meeting and to introduce our forum featuring historian David Greenberg.

Mr.

Greenberg is the author of a recent biography titled John Lewis A life A Story about Congressman John Lewis that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year.

From lunch counter sit ins, Freedom rides and the renowned march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

John Lewis His Life offers lessons of resistance, optimism, persistence and leadership in the face of brutal violence, driven by a sense of service only matched by his commitment to a vision of justice.

John Lewis was a devoted public servant who represented Georgia in Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020.

In a moment in which our nation seems defined by both national politics and the activism those politics provoke, David Greenberg's new biography masterfully paints a portrait of a man who served as the moral compass for generations, and reminds us all what courage truly looks like.

David Greenberg is a distinguished professor of history, journalism and media studies at Rutgers University.

He's the author or editor of several books on American history and politics, and writes for a variety of audiences on political affairs, media, and culture in American history.

Formerly acting editor of the New Republic and then a columnist for slate.

Greenberg now writes regularly for Politico, Liberty's, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

Moderating the conversation is Robyn Minter Smyers.

Robyn is my colleague on the City Club board, a past president of our organization and partner in the law firm of Thompson Hine, where she's held a number of leadership roles.

She also was my classmate in the Leadership Cleveland class of 2016.

Best class ever.

Exactly.

If you have a question for David Greenberg, you can text it to (330)541-5794 and the City club staff will try to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and friends of the City Club, please join me in welcoming David Greenberg and Robyn Minter Smyers.

Thank you.

David, it is such a pleasure to have you here at the City Club of Cleveland.

I know you actually had to work pretty hard to get here.

Terrible weather.

Coming from New York.

But we're so glad you made it.

Before reading, your biography of John Lewis, I thought I knew a lot about John Lewis.

But I was wrong.

I had a lot to learn.

And the more I learned, the more I felt that a dose of John Lewis was just what I needed in this moment.

And I hope that everyone here today in the city club audience, leaves this forum feeling like this also was just what they needed.

So let's start with why you've written about many political leaders, but why John Lewis?

Why did this feel like a story you had to tell?

Well, thank you, Robyn.

And first let me thank, everyone at the city Club, Dan and Cynthia.

As well as you, Robyn.

Thank Larry for that terrific introduction.

Larry is all about Cleveland.

And it's really nice to be here and have such a full, crowd, with us at lunch today.

You know, I started, the book back in the first Trump term.

This is 2018.

I sort of had the first thought of writing in 2019.

I had my first meeting with Mr.

Lewis and, you know, it was a time much like now, where we were starting to feel like a lot of the gains of our democracy of the last 50, 60 years that John Lewis had played such an important part in securing were were under threat.

And it was kind of just almost a eureka moment.

I happened to be watching a documentary about, RFK, the OG, RFK.

The real RFK, who, you know, ran for president in 1968.

And John Lewis, I hadn't been aware of had had worked on Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign as a liaison to the black community during the primaries in Indiana, California and elsewhere.

And I see John Lewis come on the screen and I just hey, has anyone written his biography?

And I realized no one, no one had I'm searching online.

And so that that was really the beginning of the journey.

Had the opportunity to meet with him, the next year.

Sadly, later in 2019, he learned he had, pancreatic cancer.

And so he didn't have much time left during the pandemic.

We had a few phone interviews, but as soon as I began work on it, I realized that we have had wonderful histories, told of the civil rights movement.

Mr.

Lewis wrote his own memoir, which is a terrific book, too.

But there was a lot here that hadn't been told, and a lot here that needed to be told.

So let's go back to, John Lewis's beginning.

Born in Troy, Alabama.

Oftentimes called the boy from Troy.

Martin Luther King's nickname for him?

Yeah.

And what about those early years planted the seed for that deep moral courage that we associate so strongly with John Lewis?

Yeah.

You really see it in John Lewis from an early age.

You know, his is a religious family.

His mother's quite devout.

The church is an important part of their life.

And so that is sort of the first focal point.

He wants to be a preacher, even as a boy.

The first book he gets is the Bible, and he just loves reading his Bible.

And then it's actually as a teenager, he hears Martin Luther King give a sermon, on the radio station coming out of Montgomery that they would listen to.

And this is right around the time of the Montgomery bus boycott.

And he's a reader.

He follows current affairs, and he's really inspired by King and and gets the idea that he wants to model his his life after Doctor King's.

I mean, you have to realize he is living, you know, as all African-Americans were in the Deep South at this time in a system that's not only racist, but it's it's completely oppressive.

It's it's a completely segregated society where whites are on top.

Blacks are on the bottom.

And very little opportunity for progress.

A lot of people, including in his family, his parents kind of took the attitude, well, let's do the best with what we have.

We have our family.

We have our church.

They were fortunate enough to own their own farm, although they often had to borrow money and debt was always a prospect.

But a lot of them didn't.

Didn't want to make trouble.

Something in John Lewis was different that his parents saw, that his siblings saw.

He felt the need to go out and try to change things for himself, for his family, for for his people.

And that's present there even as, a teenager and as a young man.

So early in the book, the poem Invictus shows up.

And in many ways this poem provides framing for the entire biography.

Can you share a little bit about that poem and John's relationship with it?

Right.

So John Lewis was a reader.

As a boy, he loved to read again, started with the Bible.

He read the newspaper, but he read poetry.

He read biography.

And in school he learns this Victorian poem.

Invictus.

Many of you may know it.

It was also turns out to be a favorite of Nelson Mandela's and others and what he would serve.

Recite it around the house.

I found these interviews with his siblings.

There was someone who started in the 1960s, a biography of John Lewis never wrote it, but I was able to get all his notes and interviews.

And so he's interviewing John Lewis, his siblings from like the 60s, and they say, oh, yeah, he used to go around the house, you know, out of the, night.

That covers me.

I'm not forgetting the exact line, you know, black as the pit from soul to soul.

But he's he's, you know, he would recite this around the house, and it's just uncanny because there are lines in the poem that precedes what goes on to happen to him at Selma and elsewhere, where it's sort of under the bludgeoning of chance.

I am bloodied but unbowed.

And that so characterizes his life and his his character, someone who had such unflinching resolve, despite the bludgeoning that he took on multiple occasions at Selma during the Freedom Rides, where he almost lost his life.

And yet he was determined to persevere in this struggle.

And to me, it's it's one of the most moving parts of the biography is, is how the framing and how that shows up again.

And finally, in his memorial services, but there's a line in that poem about his unconquerable soul and you know that to me, you know, that's John Lewis, so very powerful.

Thank you for sharing that.

So you're here at the City Club of Cleveland.

And there is a native son of Ohio, James Lawson, who plays an important role in, influencing, John Lewis.

Tell us a little bit about what we should know about, James Lawson and, John Lewis.

Okay, thanks.

Maybe my lavalier is not working, so I'll use this.

Yeah.

James Lawson, some of you may know his name.

A very important figure in the Civil rights movement, but, you know, not nearly as well known.

Of course, Dr.

King and some of the other most prominent leaders, he was, a student, divinity student at Oberlin, I believe it was, and Doctor King comes to visit to give a talk, through the intervention of a chaplain there who was went on to become a famous theology professor at Harvard himself named Harvey Cox, who I had the opportunity to interview.

And Lawson and King are about the same age, and they kind of bond over their commitment to, the study of nonviolence, the practice of nonviolence, you know, the Gandhi and teachings of satyagraha, which means soul force.

And the need to sort of fuze this to bring this into the black freedom struggle which which it already was a part, but to sort of make it more central in order to make progress.

And Lawson had been sort of planning to go off to, I think, Yale to do a doctorate in divinity at the divinity school.

There.

But King said, no, you've got to come to the South.

We need you in the South.

Lawson goes to Nashville, where instead of studying at Yale, he's going to be studying at Vanderbilt.

And there he meets up with a circle of ministers led by Kelly Miller Smith, who is a very another very important figure like King.

He's on the board of King Southern Christian Leadership Conference and has a group in Nashville that is trying to do the kind of projects and progress that King, you know, has done in Montgomery and elsewhere.

So when John Lewis goes off to college, it's at this little Bible school in Nashville called American Baptist Theological Seminary, and he begins going to Kelly Miller Smith's Church.

Smith is a professor there at American Baptist, and he also begins going to a series of lectures and almost like classes and then workshops led by James Lawson, King would say, of James Lawson, like people say, you know, James Lawson is a disciple of Martin Luther King.

But King said, I have learned more about nonviolence from James Lawson.

Lawson just passed away a couple summers ago at 94.

I also had the privilege of of interviewing him, and he said that of all of these groups in the South, you know, in 1960 was the big year for the sit ins, the lunch counter sit ins that were challenging segregation, in in cities and college towns across the South and often led by groups of students.

But he said it was the Nashville group that had was sort of the most steeped in the Gandhian teachings, the schooling of nonviolence, and that, in the end produced so many leaders of the movement.

John Lewis, but also people you may know some of these names Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, less.

Less.

You know, somewhat, more ignominious fate for, for him, but goes on, of course, a great success in politics, too.

And so there's something really special about this Nashville group led by Lawson, Kelly, Miller Smith, where John Lewis, at age 1920, becomes one of the student leaders of this movement.

So we here in Cleveland, many of us have grown up with at least some, knowledge of the civil rights movement.

In fact, many of us are lucky to have learned about the civil rights movement from some people who are with us here today.

We have the Reverend Doctor Otis Moss and Edwina moss and Carol Hoover.

Who are very important, figures in the civil rights movement.

And of all of the portions of John Lewis's activism, you know, the one that I think is most closely associated with him is, is Selma, you know, and his famous, marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

And in 1965, but this was just really one of many, instances where John Lewis, received incredibly brutal treatment while he was, protesting for civil rights.

But I think it's so central to sort of the iconography of John Lewis, like most of us can picture John Lewis and that little raincoat and, you know, his white shirt and a little black tie.

Why why was the Selma march so important?

Yeah, this Selma march, which, you know, as you say, there are few marches because the first one gets gets stopped by the state troopers.

It's a project that begins in really early 1965.

So think about where we are in time.

This kind of new wave of activism since the sit ins has been going for a few years.

And, you know, I'll pause to point out that even though John Lewis, who was born in 1940, so he's only 20 years old with the sit ins from this period of roughly 5 or 6 years, I would say there's kind of no one more central other than King to the lunch counter sit ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides of 61, which integrate, bus travel across the South, where, despite the Supreme Court ruling, that had not been permitted in 1963, he's the youngest speaker at the March on Washington and becomes chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

1964 Is Mississippi Freedom Summer kind of the great, voting rights drive that helps sort of put that issue, on the agenda at 64 is also the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, that historic piece of legislation that the movement and all of these figures do so much to help bring into being.

But after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, there was a recognition that as important and historic as that bill was, it did not really do much to address the core problem of blacks being denied the vote throughout the South.

Now, constitutionally, you know, thanks to, the Reconstruction amendments, they had the vote, but because of practices throughout the southern states, it was in practice denied.

So there's a reluctance on the part, even of supporters of the movement in Congress and Lyndon Johnson, the white House, to say, I'm not sure we can get something passed right now.

We've just done this big act.

It expended a lot of political capital.

And the people of Selma, who had been organizing for several years with the help of SNICK and with the help of John Lewis and Bernard Lafayette and many of these others, call in Doctor King and they say, we really want to make this the front and center issue for the coming months.

So on March 7th, 1965, John Lewis and Hosea Williams from SClc, Arthur, the two men at the front of the march lead a voting rights, march to go the the intention is to march all the way to Montgomery, the state capitol, in a kind of sign of great protest that this kind of grand act will help mobilize attention.

Well, what ends up mobilizing attention to, the Selma campaign is that they are met on the bridge by George Wallace's state troopers, who who stand there kind of defying them to go forward.

And when John Lewis asks for a moment to stop and pray, the troopers set upon them and start beating them senseless, and they're on horseback with with whips and with Billy clubs.

The scene, this chaos.

Many people are greatly badly injured.

Not only John Lewis, but he is hospitalized.

I actually found footage of John Lewis.

I don't think it had really been seen or used before in his hospital bed that day talking to reporters.

And was he talking about the importance of nonviolence?

I mean, it's amazing.

And in a way, you know, I had the thought it was a little bit like the George Floyd moment that here is a victim of essentially police violence, of this gratuitous, sadistic beating, whose image then, you know, we wouldn't have said in 1965 but goes viral.

It's on all the newspaper, front pages the next day.

It's even on some of the television footage that night, ABC interrupts, it's movie of the week, which happens to be Judgment at Nuremberg.

In order to show this horrific footage from right here in America in 1965, not from, you know, Nazi Germany 20 years before.

And this helps spur people all around the country to, you know, tell their legislators it gets Lyndon Johnson off the dime and and within a matter of days, Lyndon Johnson goes before a joint session of Congress calls for a voting rights Act.

And in words that bring tears to the eyes of Martin Luther King, who's watching from a Selma living room, Johnson says, we shall overcome.

And it's a real turning point in in the history of, of of racial equality of America, in establishing the Voting Rights Act, which, of course, is now getting, getting chipped away at by, a very different kind of Supreme Court.

So my, my father, Steve mentor, who is a proud City Club member, marched in the final Selma to Montgomery march and, shortly before he passed away, we had planned a trip.

A family trip, to go and walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

He wanted to walk with his grandchildren.

We didn't get to take that pilgrimage because he passed away unexpectedly.

But John Lewis made countless pilgrimages back to Selma, to that Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Why was he making those pilgrimages?

What was he trying to teach America through those celebrations of the anniversary of the March and reenactments?

Yeah, this is this is very important.

So, I mean, the first thing I'll just sort of fill in if I didn't make clear is after the aborted March of March 7th, there's continued activism in Selma.

And finally, a march does succeed over four days later that month where, you know, hundreds march over several days, going from from Selma to Montgomery, culminating in speeches before the state Capitol in a sort of a grand triumph.

Thereafter, John Lewis makes it his mission to commemorate Selma going back there year after year.

And, you know, I want to say about the book, I you know, I have a feeling we will talk a lot about these very intense and important years of civil rights.

The book has two parts.

Book one is called Protest.

Book two is called politics.

And there's a lot in here, too, about John Lewis, his career in Atlanta after the movement on city council, and then, of course, his years in Congress.

And one of the things in his later career as a congressman that was most important to him was preserving and promoting and keeping alive for future generations knowledge and memory and spirit of the movement.

You know, he felt that he was a personal living link to the movement, and he wanted to make it his mission and use his platform as a United States congressman to make this something that we never forgot.

And so at a certain point, he organizes regular annual trips on the anniversary with fellow congressmen.

And he really loved to bring along Republicans as well as Democrats.

And it does become iconic.

We associate him with that march over the bridge.

I did it a few times.

First, when I'm starting the book, I went with my family and we did it together.

I've been with a group called Faith and politics, which did these congressional pilgrimages.

And it's true, the importance of these rituals and the importance of, you know, public history.

You know, a lot of what John Lewis was devoted to as a congressman.

For example, you know, when he's first on in Congress, you get some committee assignments that are not so great.

One of his is like national parks.

So what does he do?

Very cleverly, he gets the National Park Service to designate this.

I think it's 54 mile stretch of highway from Selma to Montgomery as a national park.

I don't know that a strip of highway had ever been called a national park before, but now when you drive on that, you know it.

You see it, you learn it.

It's a way of kind of embedding this in our history and in all sorts of ways.

He would do things like this to try to keep, the movement and its achievements and also the knowledge and memory of it sort of alive and embedded in our culture.

So powerful.

You talked about, Robert Kennedy earlier and, one of the city of Cleveland's most memorable speeches, occurred on April 5th, 1968, the day after the assassination of Doctor King and Robert Kennedy was here at the City Club of Cleveland, and he delivered a speech called The Mindless Menace of Violence, which sadly feels, very relevant today.

But I learned through reading the biography that the night before, Robert Kennedy and John Lewis had been together when they learned of King's assassination.

Can you share a little bit about, that moment and what Robert Kennedy said extemporaneously?

Because I feel like it's a part of the secret history of an important city club moment.

Yeah.

I mean, this this is really, a very moving moment.

John Lewis is in Indianapolis.

This is, you know, back then, 68, it wasn't like every state had a primary in the Democratic nomination fight.

There were kind of certain states had them, and those became like the key battleground.

So I know we don't always think of the Indiana primary as that pivotal.

But here Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, we're sure the two people competing, Lyndon Johnson had by this point announced he wasn't running again.

And Lewis, as I said, is kind of a liaison to the black community.

He's out there organizing.

And that night they learn of the assassination of Doctor King and Robert Kennedy says to John Lewis, you know, I know of all of us, you know, the whole campaign team, you were the one closest to him.

You know, I can't imagine what you're going through.

And there's a real moment of kind of closeness and, and bonding there.

And Kennedy realizes that he has the duty, the obligation to tell this horrible news to the crowd.

It's a mostly black crowd.

They deliberately kind of chose a site sort of downtown and black neighborhood, and, you know, instead of going with scripted remarks, he kind of clambers up onto the back of a flatbed truck and very spontaneously just starts talking from the heart.

And he quotes from Aeschylus, it's kind of a famous speech that Bobby gives about, you know, being being saved by the the awful grace of God, I think, is the phrase he uses.

And he also says things like, you know, my brother, too, was killed by a white man.

So something of an odd formulation.

Not quite clear what he meant, but it was a way of trying to, you know, achieve a certain, sympathy or or, you know, empathy with the crowd that was there.

And Kennedy's speech is successful in keeping people calm.

A lot of cities see violence or rioting that night in Indianapolis does not.

For John Lewis, it's actually, you know, as it was for many others, the first of of two tragedies, of course, this is April 4th, two months later, June 4th, John Lewis has been out campaigning again for Kennedy, this time in Los Angeles.

Can he achieves, you know, very important victory in the California primary that night.

And again, the two of them confer up in the hotel suite.

John Lewis stays up in the suite at the Ambassador Hotel in LA.

When Bobby goes downstairs to give his victory speech, where he two then is assassinated that night.

And this was a double blow because.

John Lewis had sort of felt that Bobby Kennedy had sort of picked up the mantle of Doctor King, in a way, and that a lot of the hopes for the country, the hopes that we would pull through, what was this really terrible time of violence?

And I mean, not quite like today, but in some ways, like today, a real uncertainty about our democracy.

And after the bright hopes of the early 60s, where was this country going?

And so here, the man who had sort of picked up the mantle, he too, had been killed by an assassin's bullet.

It's also a time in John Lewis his life where at 28 years old, for the first time, he had kind of a serious girlfriend and a woman named Lillian Miles, who was living in Atlanta.

And that summer, John Lewis.

He's really depressed because of all that's happened.

Checks in the hospital for this depression.

And Lillian comes to visit him each day and very you know, she's bringing him his newspaper, his mail and giving him some company.

Very unromantic.

Lee.

He proposes from his hospital bed, and they're married.

In December, daddy King, Martin Luther King's father performs the wedding, and one of John Lewis is good friends.

Another congressman, named Buddy Darden from the adjacent district in Georgia, said to me, you can't understand John Lewis.

This whole second act, the whole second half of the book, the last 50 years of his life, without understanding the role of Lillian, who really almost nothing had been written about her.

I didn't even know that he was married.

Right?

I mean, right, yeah, she she avoided the press and but she was kind of a spark plug, and she put some of the steel in his spine, helped him realize he could be an elected official.

He could run for Congress.

He had great things ahead of him.

And so that year of 1968, the year of great tragedy, of course, with King and Kennedy being killed, it's also a pivot point in John Lewis's story as he marries Lillian and embarks on this political future.

So there are chapters in the second half of the book focused on politics.

Some of them just feel like they were made to be turned into a movie.

Do you have a chapter anywhere in the book that you think a movie should be made?

Because there's there's some special stories there.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's funny, Robyn is a good friend of my wife, Suzanne and Suzanne, as much as he loved the book, was always saying, how do we turn this into a movie?

So I'll I'll leave that to others.

But I did come to see if I were to do a movie, I would start with chapter 19.

Chapter 19 is John Lewis.

It's actually his second race for Congress.

He runs in 1977 when Andrew Young, who had been the congressman from Atlanta, goes into the Carter administration as U.N.

ambassador.

And John lost that race, but comes in a creditable second place.

Fast forward nine years later, the next representative, Wyche Fowler, is running for Senate.

So it's an open seat again.

John Lewis very much thinks, okay, it's my turn.

I came in second last time, but so does his best friend Julian Bond.

Now, today we think of John Lewis as such an icon.

But back then, John Lewis was, you know, I mean, he was well known, but he was this guy from Atlanta.

He was on city council.

He'd done these heroic things back when.

But Julian Bond, he was the one who was on Saturday Night Live, who was in the movies, dapper, debonair, just silver tongued orator, and everybody was lining up behind Julian.

And neither of these two proud men was going to drop out of the race.

I think Lillian had something to do of reminding John, you can do this.

Don't don't defer to Julian.

And what happened was basically two things.

And I should say, like they were the best of friends.

Their families would travel together.

Their birthdays were around the same time they had birthday parties together.

It was Julian Bond, really, who had educated John Lewis in the ways of the world.

I mean, he was this farm boy from rural Alabama who, at 23, as president of SNICK and Julian came from, you know what?

Some people use the phrase black royalty.

His father was a very distinguished educator.

He grew up meeting people like Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein.

And so it was very different kind of class politics, you might say.

So everyone's lining up behind Julian, but John Lewis has two advantages.

One, he's working harder.

He's out there, you know, hustling for every vote, sincerely.

Listening to people, engaging with people, making clear he's going to be their representative.

Julian's a little bit aloof, a little bit feels may be entitled to the seat.

But the other thing, which is more sort of painful for John, for both of them, more painful to discuss, is Julian Bond had a pretty serious cocaine addiction at the time, and this was the summer of Just Say No.

Drugs were ranked number one on voters Concern.

Cocaine crack was a huge problem in many black communities, and there was a real question of should this be a campaign issue?

John Lewis isn't the one to put it on the table.

There's a kind of multi-candidate race at first, and a different candidate kind of raises this, as we should all get drug tests.

But when it comes down to the two men runoff and I think we're all familiar now, Georgia has these crazy runoff elections.

There's a series of debates.

Bond thinks that, you know, he's the great speaker.

He's the flash.

Or when he's going to wipe the floor with his old friend John Lewis in the debate, Lewis, you know, holds his own pretty well because he comes off sort of his more authentic and his, his, campaign advisers, one of them said we were like, you know, accustomed to when Angelo Dundee in the corner saying like, come on, like between the breaks.

And they kept urging him to sort of raise the drug issue.

And finally, bond comes at Lewis with a kind of two bit, you know, B.S.

charge about some taking, some campaign donation.

That was nothing really particularly untoward.

I mean, no one was more ethical than John Lewis.

And this gets Lewis's dander up and he comes out and says, you know, Julian, why don't we both go to Grady Hospital and take the drug test?

So in the runoff, this becomes a real issue in the first round of the primary, I think bond had won something like 47% of the vote to Lewis's 32.

And in the second election, a bond goes up to 48% and Lewis gets 52.

So it's this come from behind victory.

He ends up being the nominee for the Democratic Party and hence the the next congressman from Atlanta.

It ends up really destroying their friendship.

It's it's tragic in many ways.

I have a few, anecdotes in the book about how toward the end of Julian's life, there started to be a little bit of repair.

But Lewis wasn't invited to the funeral, and his his wife, his second wife, didn't want to talk to me for the book.

So there was a real falling out there that never fully got repaired.

But I do think that would make a great movie.

So encourage your wife to go sign up for an agent.

So, we need to leave time for the Q&A.

I regret that I only got to about half of the questions I had for you.

So we're now going to begin our audience Q&A portion for our radio and live stream audiences.

I'm Robyn Smyers, member of the City Club board of directors and moderator for today's program.

Joining me on stage today is David Greenberg, Distinguished Professor of History, journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and the author of the biography John Lewis A Life.

We welcome questions from everyone city Club members, guests, students, as well as those joining us via the live stream at City club.org, or our live radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideas Stream public media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's 3305475415794, and a city club staff member will work your question into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

One of John Lewis's notable qualities was his moral leadership.

Who do you think is carrying his legacy forward in terms of moral leadership, but also unafraid to get into good trouble?

That's a good question.

You know, it's right now I think we're all sort of feeling a moment where, you know, people are kind of crying out for, for leadership and, you know, I do think there are a lot of people fighting the good fight, you know, I'm hesitate, I hesitate to name a single person because I, I think John Lewis really was sui generis.

I mean, he was someone who distinguished himself as a moral leader when he was such a young man who came to national prominence, you know, in the 1960s.

But then what was remarkable about that was he was able to sort of convert that into, in some ways, also a unique way of being a congressman.

You know, a lot of people would say to me, I was interviewed a lot of members of Congress staff and so on, and you often heard this line, oh, he wasn't that much of a legislator.

Now, other people pushed back, and there were actually a number of important things he did accomplish as a legislator.

But, one person I interview was Barney Frank, a terrific congressman from my hometown of Newton, Massachusetts, who said, all right, so he wasn't much of a legislator, but there's a lot of congressmen who can do that.

He said he he provided something else, that moral leadership.

And you could see especially kind of toward the end of his career, you know, often younger members of Congress, if there was a difficult vote, they would wait and not vote on the first round and wait to see how John Lewis voted.

And then if he voted for something that would, you know, they felt it was okay to do so.

And in lots of other ways, his signing on to a bill gave it a certain credibility as a co-sponsor.

You know?

So, it's really, you know, I don't know that there's a single person who plays that role in Congress right now.

But, it was a really special and distinct role that he did play.

John said that, immigration reform was like the new civil rights movement of these times.

Can you tell me any specific action he was involved in on behalf of immigrants?

Yeah, he he it was it was a cause he supported for a very long time.

But, you know, especially under Trump and again, I'm talking after the first term, although obviously it's become even more of a dire situation now.

I had just a few chances to speak to him.

This was in the spring of 2020.

And I remember asking, well, you know, what has troubled you most?

And he said, you know, seeing those kids in the barracks, he had been part of this congressional trip that went, I think it was to Florida, where immigrant kids who had been separated from their parents were being housed in these military barracks, and it was just so painful for him to see that going on in the United States.

He would participate in protests.

There were, you know, those immigration.

There were a lot of protests during Trump one, but he was he was there on the front lines of those, he was, you know, a sponsor and a participant in a lot of the legislation.

And unfortunately, you know, with the with the gridlock with the two parties, there wasn't much legislation for forthcoming.

One thing that's interesting about John Lewis, you know, with this theme of protest and politics, I have in the book when he found politics unavailing, he kind of would reach back into his bag for some of the tools of protest and, you know, and vice versa.

And I often say, you know, it's most of us would feel quite proud if we can see that one thing in a big way in our lifetime.

And he really had a successful career in, in both in protest and politics.

My question for you is I want you to put your historian hat, and it took us 100 years from the reconstruction to the Civil Rights Act, you know, and we seem to be going backwards.

And at what point do you see this changing, or are we going to have to wait another hundred years for this to turn around?

Right.

Well, you're actually asking me to put on my futurist hat, not a historians hat.

It's it's much easier in some ways, to analyze the past than to predict the future.

You know, I think John Lewis would say that what our history teaches us, or one thing that our history teaches us, is that as as bleak as it can seem in the present moment, we have been through bleaker, harder times.

Times where at least if you were an African-American person or family in Alabama, democracy was even less alive than it is today, and that John Lewis and many, many other men and women like him were not only able to retain hope that that could be, overcome in the words of the song, but would take it upon themselves to make sure that that happened and in fact, did make sure that that happened.

So in recent years, when there was pessimism and there was despair, Lewis was always insistent that it was very possible for us to turn things around, that it had happened before, indeed, that he had been a part of it happening before.

And that we should not forget that history, because that history can be a source of comfort and solace and inspiration and of hope.

And I think that was very much the the message and the language that he was using in his final years.

what sentiments and feelings were, you know, coursing through you as you were, you know, discussing with somebody who was directly a part of this?

Yeah.

I mean, it really was a kind of awe inspiring moment because, you know, of course, I'd read a lot of him.

I'd done all my homework, before going to meet with him.

But, you know, nothing quite prepares you for the face to face encounter.

On the one hand, he's an incredible, incredibly modest and humble person, so he makes you feel at ease, but you also feel like you are here with living history.

I mean, I should say this was kind of a moment.

It's taken me months to get this interview.

Finally, I fly down to Atlanta.

A week before, John Lewis had done the coin toss at the Super Bowl, and the very next day he was flying to Los Angeles to introduce Green Book at the Oscars.

So it's a Super Bowl Oscars.

It's like peak John Lewis.

And here I have 45 minutes on a Friday afternoon.

I'm in his Atlanta office, you know, every inch of shelf space.

Man is like, there's awards and trophies and, you know, citations given to him.

All this memorabilia from the movement, from the campaigns.

So you really feel like you're in the presence of living history, sitting there with John Lewis.

Good afternoon, professor.

My name is, Faustina.

Firstly, congratulations on your book.

I see that you really capture the life of John Lewis.

Professor, in your view, which quality or attribute of, John Lewis setting apart from every black man in America during that era?

And what, in your view, count as a black man in America today do to emulate the good examples of John Lewis?

Thank you.

Yeah.

Well, look, I don't know that I, I'm going to frame my answer in what I think black men should do, but.

I will say, I think what we all can do, you know, I mean, for one thing, the quality that really was distinctive about John Lewis and sort of members of the of SNICK, fellow activists in the movement, said to this, you know, we all had this commitment to nonviolence.

But with John, it just went deeper that it was a core part of who he was.

I mean, James Lawson said this to me that even when he got to Nashville, he said he was ripe for this kind of the teachings, the schooling in the Gandhian nonviolence.

And people said they could just see a kind of inner equanimity or serenity about him as he prepared to encounter violence, that he he just had a, confidence that he was doing the right thing.

I found I saw another, interview, a video interview with him.

It must have been, his first national press conference during the Freedom Rides.

And Ralph Abernathy is there and King is there, and they ask about getting back on these busses to go face probably more violent mobs.

The rides had all been disrupted by one horrendous attack in Birmingham.

And John Lewis says to the reporters, he's like, look, I don't want to die, you know, but he's he's perfectly aware that he might die.

And he's like, But I'm prepared to do that.

If that's what it's going to take to bring freedom.

you were just speaking about how John Lewis used those nonviolence, techniques in his protests and how he used courage.

And his main form of protest was using nonviolence in his techniques.

But I was wondering more of on how he was able to do that, in the face of adversity and those, replies of violence back towards him.

How was he able to continue, and how was he able to keep his courage and his nonviolent techniques?

Yeah, it's well, right.

And it relates to what I was just saying.

It is a quality that he seems to have had, you know, from early on, a certain kind of confidence and resolve, I think partly he understood, you know, the long game.

On the one hand, he shared the impatience.

The gentleman before said, look, it took a hundred years from civil war to Civil Rights Act.

And he he wasn't counseling, you know, a kind of, you know, casual patience.

Oh, wait.

It'll happen.

Don't don't, you know.

No, it was important to make it happen.

But he also understood, that you get gains slowly, that sometimes, you know, in fits and starts.

Sometimes there's periods of great progress followed by periods of of, you know, stagnation.

But he understood that just one had to keep going.

And it was it was an unending, quest.

And, you know, I think that's part of the how that he there was no moment at which you could kind of give up and throw up your hands and say, either we've lost or we've won.

But it was about the struggle.

So my name is Renee Logan.

I work for Team Neo and I do a little bit of government affairs work and engagement for our region.

And I get the lens of the entire scope sometimes of what's happening politically.

And so here's my question.

We know history can repeat itself, whether it's good or bad and what when looking back at the history and life of this great leader, John Lewis, now looking today and moving forward, understanding the climate that we're in, in your opinion, what is it that we need in our country to be more John Lewis like so that we are not repeating our history and the mistakes we've made in the past?

Yeah, well, you know, in some ways, I do sometimes worry that, you know, look in a room like this, as we're talking about John Lewis, there's great admiration for him and appreciation of what he's done.

But I think some of the things that he talked about and embodied sometimes, I especially I find with students and younger people seem a little bit unfashionable.

Not everybody appreciates the power and the success of the nonviolent movement.

For example, you know, I have students sometimes saying to me, well, is, aren't they just chumps?

Aren't you know, why?

Why should the people who are already the victims be the ones to be kind of further victimized by violence?

And these are good questions, and they're questions that people ask at the time.

And there were real, splits and rifts within the civil rights movement about, the role of nonviolence, about the role of interracial cooperation, about the, you know, questions about working with the system or remaining outside the system.

These were sort of real, debates.

And it's not as though there's one correct answer for every moment.

Sometimes a situation might call for more adversarial or militant posture.

Sometimes one that's a bit more strategic or tactical, in getting what you want.

But I think, you know, one thing that underpinned the Gandhian philosophy and really the whole social gospel thinking was that there was humanity in everyone, even in one's adversaries, even in the people who were oppressing you.

I remember in 2019, Joe Biden had made some comments about how, as a senator, he was proud that he had sort of worked with, you know, even people like James Eastland, who was one of the most sort of ugly segregationist senators from Mississippi.

And he got a lot of heat for this.

And John Lewis came to his defense.

He said, of course we worked with them.

That's who we had to work with.

And it wasn't just tactical that Lewis had a belief that in time, even these people could change and could see the error of their ways and late in life, time and again, this happened.

People who had physically beaten up John Lewis would come into his congressional office, you know, decades later to apologize, when the guys who as a young kid on the Freedom Rides had beaten up John Lewis in a bus stop, you know, did this the, the sheriff, from, Montgomery, he was not the sheriff from the time, but on a trip that Lewis made turns, gives his badge to John Lewis, and apologizes on behalf of the city of Montgomery and John Lewis being John Lewis.

He says, well, don't don't you need this badge like, can you get another, you know.

But he's very, like, self-effacing.

So in some ways, I mean, as hard as it is, because sometimes we're today reckoning with some very ugly sentiments and forces that capacity to see humanity in everyone, I think, is something we all need to struggle to retain.

Thank you very much to Robyn Minter Smyers and David Greenberg for joining us at the City Club today.

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Please join me in welcoming students joining us from Davis Aerospace Maritime High School.

So are you guys earlier an MC squared Stem high school.

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We would also like to welcome guests to the table hosted by the Cleveland Foundation.

Friends of Carol Hoover, friends of Larry Friedman, who I understand is Lee's first cousin, our Lee Lee Friedman, our board, our board member, ideo stream public media, Paul Harris and friends University school with many tables and the.

YMCA of Greater Cleveland.

Thank you all for being here.

Y w I'm sorry.

Wow.

I did that.

YWCA.

All righty.

Okay.

Shamed on stage.

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Coming up in a few weeks on Friday, November 14th, we'll be talking about rock n roll.

Pat Carney with the Black Keys will be in conversation with John Pans of the Panzer Foundation to discuss the band's journey to success and how we can all support musicians in an increasingly complicated music industry.

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And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to David and Rob.

And I'm Mark Ross in.

This forum is now adjourned.

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