My life was relatively peaceful in winter 2020 as I savored the first months in my new Arizona home. But hermits aren’t islands, and the darkness of a pandemic, the pain of police brutality, mass shootings, racial unrest and injustice; deaths, deportations and incarcerations along the nearby border; and insurrection—all these inflict anguish.
So I wanted to reflect more on the Black experience in America, including the Black church and slaveholder religion. I read the March trilogy, a graphic novel about the late Congressman John Lewis, whose funeral had captivated me.
I knew a little about his story, but the funeral taught me more. Some of what I learned was simply charming, such as his having preached to his chickens when a child on his parents’ little farm near Troy, Alabama. I knew that he was beaten nearly to death in the march on Selma in 1965. But I didn’t know that he had carried two books in his backpack that day, one of which was Thomas Merton’s autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain. That book is a big reason I became a Roman Catholic and joined a monastic community when I was fresh out of college. Nor did I know that Lewis gave a speech after being beaten and only afterwards agreed to go to the hospital.
Relentless Violence
March introduced me to the relentlessness of the violence Lewis and his friends faced in the sixties and the terrible life-and-death calculations they had to make as their movement took shape. March reveals tense disagreements within and between groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The amount of suffering is staggering by the end of volume two. Then volume three opens with the Birmingham church bombing in September 1963, which killed four young girls on the Feast of Our Lady, Mother of Sorrows. A few weeks later came the assassination of President Kennedy.
As a kid ten years old in Kokomo, Indiana, these events seemed distant. Strange that nearly sixty years later they feel too close for comfort. With dramatic illustrations and Lewis’s eyewitness accounts of these days, I felt an almost intimate closeness to the heroism and heartbreak of those years. We read the headlines, but March relates anecdotes and vignettes, details and conversations, that make these years come alive. They live as a kind of pulse beating beneath our current volatility.
LBJ and Selma
I was surprised by President Johnson’s eloquence as he spoke to Congress just days after the Selma March. He always struck me as a repugnant, vulgar man with an almost preternaturally effective and ruthless political instinct. I had no idea that he had delivered such a noble address. Lewis himself called it “one of the most moving speeches I have ever heard an American president give on civil rights.” The horror of Vietnam eclipsed this shining moment in Johnson’s tattered career.
What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
Lyndon B. Johnson, March 21, 1965
March begins and ends with the Inauguration of Barack Obama. Throughout the trilogy, snippets from that day appear to help counter the sense of doom that so often weighed on Lewis and his friends in those years leading up to the passing of the Voting Rights Act. An excerpt from Obama’s memoir refers to a heartfelt farewell letter from Senator Ted Kennedy that Ted’s wife passed to Obama after the senator’s death. So it was moving to read that in the middle of a sleepless inauguration night on January 20, 2009, Kennedy called Lewis and left a message:
“I was thinking of you. I was thinking of you and Martin. I was thinking about the years of work, the bloodshed…the people who didn’t live to see this day. I was thinking about Jack and Bobby…”
Rise Up
I have been thinking about John Lewis standing at Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. shortly before he died. I think about his lifelong commitment to getting into “good trouble” for the sake of justice. And I think about “Rise Up,” Andra Day’s song that became the Black Lives Matter anthem. She herself says “there are lines in there I’d normally find cliché. But sometimes a good cliché is exactly what you need in a moment of hopelessness.” She wrote it as a prayer after hearing that a friend had cancer. It is a good Resurrection song and makes me think of Lewis’s indomitable spirit:
I’ll rise up
Rise like the day
I’ll rise up
In spite of the ache
I will rise a thousand times again.
And we’ll rise up
High like the waves
We’ll rise up
In spite of the ache
We’ll rise up
And we’ll do it a thousand times again
For you.
Always important reflections.
Thank you, Fr. Dave, for witnessing through your writing,
I will share with others.
Systemic racism is only one of the many areas that have an all-pervasive presence in our lives. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and so many other black activists have been drawing the world’s attention to the problem. Despite attempts to lessen or prevent racism, how successful have the champions against racism been? How many lives have been lost trying to bring about needed changes, and transformation of hearts, minds and spirits? Why?
There are major systemic challenges in our workplaces, families, schools, churches, political parties. Each cardinal sin exerts a systemic influence. Given the collective and personal unconscious, the prognosis for resolving or lessening the impact of these pervasive attitudes appears nearly impossible!
This is an awesome thought searching article. Thanks David. Life is truly an amazing God giving circle!
God Bless and please stay safe.
I think Stephen Colbert said John Lewis was “like an angel on Congress’s shoulder.” The current political environment reminds me of the swinging pendulum I thought would never swing this far.
Poignant reflections, Dave, thanks so much.
John Lewis’s life is awe inspiring. His devotion to serving this country in the Congress is a testament to his love for his country in spite of all it had done to put him down as a young man…and continues to try and do to so many other young Black men.
Thanks for your writing! It is so important to have these events put before our consciousness! So critical to maintain the long view of things. As a kid 5 years old in Frankfort, IN in 1963 I was protected from the news of the bombing of the Birmingham church. Incidentally, my maternal grandfather died that July (1963) and my mom lost a full term baby that September. Seeing my mother crying as she watched the funeral of JFK I thought we were watching the funeral of my grandfather. The tears were the same. Your citation of LBJ’s Selma reflection and my reflection on my mother’s tears echo John Donne, “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” (No Man is an Island by John Donne)