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- He grew up in abject poverty.

He became a champion of non-violence, a civil rights pioneer, enduring threats and beatings along the way.

The late Congressman John Lewis helped gain freedoms for millions of African Americans.

We'll talk about his life with one of Florida's top historians, Ray Arsenault, on a special edition of Florida This Week.

(suspenseful music) (suspenseful music continues) Welcome back, our guest, Ray Arsenault, has been chronicling the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

His latest book is a profile of someone at the center of that movement, Congressman John Lewis.

The late Congressman John Lewis was born in 1940 in rural Alabama.

His parents were sharecroppers.

Segregation was the oppressive rule in the South.

The form of legal discrimination that he challenged throughout his life.

Coming from a deeply religious family, Lewis aspired to be a preacher.

And at age 17, he entered American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville and was ordained a Baptist minister.

In 1961, he was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders.

A group of Blacks and whites who wrote interstate buses from Washington, DC into the deep South to challenge segregation.

Along the way, the riders were met with fierce opposition.

He helped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. organize the March on Washington in August, 1963.

When he was 25, he and fellow activist, Hosea Williams, led voting rights marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where the crowd was viciously attacked by white police and state troopers.

Lewis's skull was fractured.

The entire incident became known as Bloody Sunday.

Over the course of his life, Lewis was arrested 40 times.

Nevertheless, he maintained his commitment to peace and non-violence.

Lewis was first elected to Congress in Georgia's fifth congressional district in 1986, and was reelected 18 times.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

Lewis was often called the conscience of the Congress by his fellow members.

And Ray Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor Emeritus of Southern History at the University of South Florida, has written a new book about the Congressman and activist called "John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community".

And Ray Arsenault joins us right now.

Ray, thanks for coming by WEDU.

- My pleasure, Rob.

- Nice to see you again.

Set the scene for us.

What was it like in the 1940s and 50s as John was growing up in the sharecropper family?

Talk about the level of discrimination.

Talk about whether or not you could ever get ahead as a sharecropper.

- Well, you know, as a young boy, he really didn't have much contact with whites.

They lived about 10 miles out of Troy.

It was the nearest large community, and no paved roads, no electricity, no indoor plumbing.

You know, it was very, very primitive.

And he lived in a kind of an all Black world really for those early, early years.

But when he finally did go to Troy, he discovered the realities of Jim Crow.

- [Rob] What did he see?

- Well, he was sort of warned by his family, you know, not to, if you're walking down the sidewalk and someone's walking towards you and he is white, you step off.

You don't want any incidents.

He didn't actually go to Troy or anywhere else very much until he was a teenager.

His first protest, actually, that his story, or launched his career was when he was 16.

And he was a voracious reader.

One of 10 children, the other children, I think, had sort of resigned themselves to working in the fields, chopping cotton and that sort of thing.

But John hated it, and he didn't want that kinda life, and he was always sort of hiding behind the covers of a book.

So, he went to the public library, which of course, was all white, no Blacks were allowed in, and were not given library cards or anything.

Couldn't use the library.

And he went in and asked for a library card when he was 16.

Of course, they threw him out into the street.

But typical John Lewis, that wasn't the end of it for him.

He wrote up a petition to try to have the library desegregated, and he circulated it among the students in his all Black school.

But most of them were too scared to sign it.

A few of his cousins signed it.

And so, it didn't come to anything, but I love this story.

Years later, after he wrote his wonderful memoir, "Walking With The Wind", which was a bestseller in 1998.

Even the Troy Public Library decided to invite him back, kind of the favorite son.

So, the first thing he did when he went into the library, says, "I want my library card," you know, and he got it.

- His family was very religious, and he wanted to become a preacher, but he had a different view of religion.

He didn't believe in kind of pie in the sky or reward in the afterlife.

- That's right, he was very religious.

You may have heard the story that he actually practiced preaching to the chickens.

He was given the chickens at the farm, and he treated them like they were his children, and he named them, and he tried to keep them out of the pot, you know, they were his pets.

And he has a slight speech impediment, and of course, a deep southern drawl.

And he was sort of self-conscious about that.

So, he tried to perfect his speaking.

But the preachers in that part of rural Alabama, Black preachers, really had no contact to the social gospel.

- [Rob] What is the social gospel?

- Well, it was a philosophy of kind of social action using religion as kind of the basis of social action.

Walter Rauschenbusch was one of the kind of philosophers who developed it in the early 20th century.

And the term has been used in different ways by many people.

But Dr. King considered himself to be a social gospel preacher.

And really John Lewis' first connection was listening to a radio sermon in 1956 by my Martin Luther King Jr. and he was just thrilled.

Of course, that was during the Montgomery Bus boycott and where the whole community was acting in a kind of social gospel way, you know, voting with their feet and a year-long boycott, which came outta nowhere.

Nobody ever expected the Black community, which had a kind of conservative reputation to do such a thing that, that kind of nonviolent direct action would come out of the Black South.

But it thrilled John, and he wanted to find some way to use his religious belief, but for the good of people in the here and now, you know?

And he went to American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville.

- Now, I said in the intro that he became a minister, but he did not.

- He did not.

Well, in a way he did when he was a kid.

He actually, his picture appeared in the paper as the boy preacher.

And I have a picture when he was 11 years old, being the boy preacher in the book.

And he was, I mean, he was sort of ordained, not officially at that point, but he, of course, planned to be a preacher and spent four years at American Baptist.

But he became disillusioned almost immediately when he, he went to the president of the school.

The American Baptist Theological Seminary was actually run by the United Methodist, by a white church.

And so they had to tread lightly in terms of things like civil rights.

So, the president, John went in and said, "I wanna organize a chapter, a college chapter of the NAACP."

He was shocked that they didn't have one.

And the president sort of told him the reality of the situation and sort of sent him on his way.

And he actually thought about transferring.

He was so discouraged, he couldn't, at first year, he couldn't find anybody else who really knew anything about or cared about the social gospel.

It was only in the second year when James Lawson, a great preacher, who became one of John's main mentors, came to organize nonviolent workshops in Nashville for the fellowship of reconciliation.

Dr. King had basically sent him South, and John was just thrilled by what he heard.

Every Tuesday night they would gather in a Methodist church and it grew to, you know, several dozen young students like John, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette.

And some people become great leaders of the movement.

And it changed all their lives.

- How did nonviolence intersect with Christianity?

He's at this Baptist Academy, and how did they embrace also along with their Christianity non-violence?

- Well, you know, you can interpret, particularly African American Christianity, Protestantism, in a way that leads to non-violence, but it normally didn't happen.

You know, it was, you know, preachers often were kind of power brokers between the white and Black community.

And they often were more interested in their Cadillacs than they were in, you know, spreading kind of social justice.

And maybe in their hearts they wanted to do that, but they didn't feel they had the latitude to do it.

But for Jim Lawson, who was John Lewis' mentor, it was some kind of a mixture of Ghandianism and African American religion.

And so, there was no kind of pure type.

It was kind a hybrid between what Gandhi had preached.

He was really the great kind of inspiration.

Of course, then Dr. King became known as the American Gandhi during the bus boycott.

And he really inspired John to try to follow in his path that there was a social gospel way to do it without being a preacher.

- A few years after the bus boycott in Montgomery, there were sit-ins in Nashville.

These were some of the first sit-ins that were successful in the South.

- They were, they were a little bit disappointed, because, you know, Jim Lawson was training them, and they had kind of dry runs.

They'd go down to a place they wouldn't really have a sit-in.

They would go in and then they would sort of survey the place.

And this was in early 1960.

And so, the Greensboro kids beat them basically.

They were sort of shocked and a little disappointed that they weren't the first.

They probably had the best organized student group to conduct sit-ins.

And they were very early, soon after the Greensboro sit-ins, they did start sit-ins, and they had stand-ins in the theaters and everything you can imagine.

- How did Nashville change?

- Well, they won.

I mean, it was amazing.

They were absolutely determined, and they suffered beatings and arrests.

John certainly did, but they were not about to give up.

As Diane Nash, one of them said, you know, "If you stop us, others will follow."

You know, "If you beat us, if you kill us, it doesn't matter.

We will not let violence chase out non-violence."

So, they were really true believers.

Probably the best trained activists in the United States, because of Jim Lawson.

Who had spent three years in India studying Ghandianism, had been a conscientious objector.

Spent a year in prison in the early fifties, and was a real kind of quiet charisma.

I mean, he had an extraordinary impact on people.

And he walked the walk and talked the talk, and everybody wanted to be Jim Lawson.

- Shortly after that they began to plan for the Freedom Rides.

Talk about what was the aim of the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s?

- Well, the Freedom Rides grew out of Congress racial equality.

And Jim Farmer, who really started planning them the first day he became the National Director of CORE.

And he wanted something to put CORE on the map.

And they had actually sponsored a, something called the Journey of Reconciliation back in 1947, kind of the first freedom ride.

They didn't call it a freedom ride, they only did it in the Upper South.

They had no women with them.

And it was the same week that Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League baseball.

So, they didn't get much press.

Few of them ended up in jail.

Baird Rustin was one of the main figures.

And they thought that would be the first of a number of these so-called Freedom Rides, but in the fifties, the Cold War kind of dampened, pushed them into a kind of subterranean, almost beyond the pale.

So, the CORE almost disappeared in the 1950s, really the Montgomery bus boycott that brings it back.

And then of course, the sit-ins in 1916 in Greensboro and all over the South.

And then, of course, the Freedom Rides is their great victory.

But their plan was to do something shocking to force the Kennedy administration to care about civil rights, to move to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans.

At that time, Kennedy was essentially a cold warrior.

He really wasn't interested in race and civil rights.

He was looking really at the world scene.

He was more interested in Berlin and summit meetings with Khrushchev.

He didn't want things in Alabama to upset the apple cart, which of course they did.

- Bobby Kennedy was his brother, was the Attorney General.

What was his view about civil rights?

- Well, Bobby had more, I think, experience, but, you know, he was very loyal to his brother.

And as John Kennedy said, "Get those people off those buses.

They're embarrassing us."

- [Rob] He tried to talk 'em out of it.

- Oh yeah, absolutely.

But of course, there no way, no way in the world that they were gonna stop.

- You talk about some of the best training.

What kind of training did they go through to take part in their Freedom Rides?

- Well, they do kind of social drama where they'll role play.

And so, the members of the group will, some will play white supremacists, and they'll be spitting on them and screaming racial epithets and kicking them.

And they have to learn not to fight back, not to give as much as they got.

And it's extraordinary, there were 436 Freedom Riders.

There's not a single incident of a Freedom Rider striking back.

I mean, they're willing to turn the other cheek and take it.

- Talk about some of the incidents of violence that they met along the Freedom Rides.

- Well, the first example of violence was in Rock Hill, South Carolina, about a one week after they left Washington.

They were going a two-week trip from Washington to New Orleans.

And a group of young Klansmen met them at the bus station in Rock Hill and beat John Lewis and a couple of others pretty badly.

The police actually came and offered to arrest them, but John wouldn't let them.

He said, "No, no, no, I'm not gonna blame individuals for the evils of a system."

That's who he was really.

But one of those Klansmen, a man named Elwin Wilson, who was about 24 years old at the time, kind of a Klansman in training.

He, for his whole life really, he felt guilty about what he did to John Lewis in Rock Hill in 1961.

And he went on and he got religion.

He left the Klan, he had a family.

He was not well educated, he was poor, but he always felt terrible about what he'd done.

And so in 2009, when Barack Obama's first inauguration is held and sitting there on the grandstand as President Obama takes his oath of office is John Lewis big as life.

So, Mr. Wilson sees him, and on his kind of an impulse, he calls John's office and gets John actually.

He's sobbing over the phone saying, "I'm so sorry.

I can't believe I did that to you.

I've always felt terrible about it.

Will you please forgive me?"

And of course, it was a John Lewis, of course, he forgives him.

Not only does he forgive him, he flies him up to Washington at his expense to have him come to Jesus meeting in John's office.

And once again, they're crying and praying together.

And so that's in 2009.

Well, two years later, we had the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, and all the Freedom riders were invited on the Oprah Show.

And Oprah's producers, Oprah after all, you know, there's kind of a dark topic about white supremacists trying to burn people to death, because they wanna sit in the front of a bus.

They said, "Have you got any reconciliation stories?"

And so we said, "Well, yeah, we do.

We've got any reformed Klansmen.

We actually, we do.

We had Mr.

Wilson."

So, they got Mr. Wilson to come on the show.

- We have some video of one of the earlier meetings between Wilson and Congressman John Lewis.

And let's play that video right now.

- I'm sorry for what happened down there.

- Well, it's okay.

It's all right.

It's almost 48 years ago.

- That's right.

- I don't understand how Wilson is, how the Congressman is so forgiving.

- He forgave everybody, you know, I mean, there just wasn't a mean spirited bone in his body.

I mean, I never saw any incident of.

The closest he ever came actually to exerting force was when in Selma in 1965, in January when Dr. King was trying to desegregate a hotel in Selma.

And he was gonna be able to do it.

And then this notorious white supremacist came up and started punching him in the face.

Really was about to hurt him.

John was standing next to him, and he gives a bear hug around this man and stops him.

And he later said, "I'm so sorry."

You know, I mean, he did the right thing, of course.

But for him, that was as close to violence as he had ever come.

But on the Oprah Show, you know, here's Mr. Wilson, there are 20 million people watching this show.

There are 180 Freedom Riders in the audience, and he's kind of the designated villain.

And Oprah asks him the first question, and he's just silent, nothing.

So, she tries again, and he, look, I was sitting off camera right next to John Lewis and Mr. Wilson's on the other side, and I could see what was happening.

And he was about to implode.

He was gonna run off the set.

And at just the right moment, John reaches out with his left hand, and he grabs his right hand in a voice that everybody could hear.

He said, "He's my brother.

He's my brother."

And he meant it, you know, and there wasn't a dry eye in the place, but for me, that'll always be the quintessential John Lewis.

- Part of that training was that you've gotta love your enemy.

Part of that training, the Freedom Riders went through, and all these early activists went through.

- Yeah, not an easy thing to pull off.

I mean, there were a few civil rights leaders who were able to do it.

Dr. King, CT Vivian, Jim Lawson, Diane Nash, of course, John is a quintessential example, but that's the kind of gold standard of non-violence, if you can get to that point.

The beloved community was a concept that John believed in deeply, and so did Dr. King.

And went back to the First World War philosopher Josiah Royce came up with that term.

It's just a sense of unity, a sense of not dividing people, not treating people as the other, a truly beloved community.

And part of that is loving your enemies, really loving them.

Not just tolerating them, not just not striking them, but actually literally loving 'em.

And of course, the concept of love is at the center of it all.

- At the same time, John Lewis promoted nonviolence and pacifism, he also was militant in a sense, because as he helped organize the 1963 march on Washington.

He was gonna be one of the top speakers.

And some people in the movement did not like what he was about to say.

- Oh, they sure didn't.

No, he was the bad boy.

He was the, you know?

- [Rob] What did he wanna say?

- He was the head of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was the most radical group.

And this was the March on Washington for jobs and freedom.

And he didn't want them to forget that.

The Kennedy administration wanted this as a kind of sideshow, if you will, in support of the Civil Rights bill, which dealt with public accommodations.

But really nothing else, and John didn't want that.

And he fought bitterly, even though he was only 23 years old, you know?

He was half the age of most of the so-called Big Six leaders.

And because he was the head of SNCC, he was given the opportunity to speak.

But most of the SNCC activists didn't want him.

They didn't wanna have anything to do with the March on Washington.

And John wanted to make sure, well, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna give a really radical speech.

So, in his original text, he talked about the movement marching through the South, like Sherman's army through Georgia.

These really provocative terms, and talking about a revolution and all this kind of thing.

And some of the more conservative people involved in organizing the march just flipped out.

And they said, they started to walk out actually.

This is just before the speeches were made that day.

And so, John had to rewrite his speech.

And it was A. Philip Randolph who was really kind of the godfather of the march.

Of course, it was really his idea more than anyone else's.

And at a point when they're trying to get John to change, Randolph turns to him and says, "John, I've been waiting for this all my life.

Please don't ruin it for me.

Please you need to compromise."

And he did.

- A lot of people were saying, "Patience, wait your turn."

- Well, interestingly enough that he used the word patience in his original text.

And one of the bishops of the Catholic Church, who was one of the organizers, just took great umbrage that he said, "You cannot use the word patience."

Nobody really figured out why he was so upset about the word patience, but that's one of the words that John took out of the speech.

- John was a critic of patience.

He wanted to move forward.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, like the other activists, the Freedom Riders, they didn't want freedom later.

They wanted freedom now.

I mean, they knew they were being, in some sense, in historical context, unreasonable, but they were deliberately unreasonable.

They wanted to push people into a situation where you could have really deep, deep change.

- We're almost at the end of the interview, but I want to ask about Selma, where John was severely beaten along with others.

Talk about the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

- Oh, wow.

Well, there ended up being several marches.

The March that became known as Bloody Sunday, John and Hosea Williams was representing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King's organization.

They led 600 marches over the bridge.

And there they saw on the other side, of course, the state troopers and the mounted posse men who were itching to stop them physically with violence.

And that's what they did.

And John was nearly killed.

It was a terrible concussion, fractured skull.

In fact, when they actually did get the march when they got an injunction, and Judge Frank Johnson made it possible for them to march the 52 miles to Montgomery, John had to make a deal with his doctor.

He was still in the hospital.

You can march during the day, but we'll pick you up and you will drive you back to Selma.

And so, he did this for the entire march.

And he gave a wonderful speech at the end, along with Dr. King.

But that was the, you know, that was the most important episode of his life.

He reenacted it many times.

You know, the Faith in Politics group, which he helped organize.

I actually was there with them this year when they walked across the bridge in a kind of commemoration of what happened on Bloody Sunday.

But, you know, he had to tell that story over and over again.

And you know, you can only imagine what it was like to do that, to talk about, 'cause he really thought he was gonna die.

- What was the impact on Washington DC on Congress of seeing that incident on the bridge?

- Well, I think it was crucial to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

I mean, John really had more than anybody else, I think had a hand in that.

Which is kinda ironic because earlier in his career, he really wasn't that interested in voting rights because the Kennedy administration wanted to push SNCC and the other groups into voter registration.

They thought it was less controversial.

They were wrong about that.

But they didn't want them to do nonviolent direct action in the streets where there'd be whites and Blacks, you know, clashing.

So, through Harry Belafonte, the Kennedy administration offered all kinds of money for SNCC to focus on voting rights.

And so they, eventually, they split.

Bernard Lafayette came up.

Well, they had two wings, and even a bird needs two wings to fly, you know, but John was part of the group that was very suspicious of the Kennedy administration's emphasis on voting rights.

Ironic that he became the great champion of voting rights, you know, but he really came to believe that, that was absolutely essential as a first step really towards dismantling the whole Jim Crow system.

- Ray, we've barely gotten into the book.

I haven't asked you about Good Trouble, but we are out of time.

Ray Arsenault, thanks a lot for joining us here at WEDU.

- My pleasure, Rob.

- Okay, the book is "John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community".

If you have comments about this program, please send them to ftw@wedu.org.

The show is available at wedu.org or on YouTube.

And from all of us here at WEDU, have a great Memorial Day weekend.

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