John Lewis to Black Lives Matter protesters: ‘Give until you cannot give any more’
John Lewis stood with his backpack over his shoulders and his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. The 25-year-old’s eyes were fixed on the line of Alabama state troopers with billy clubs in their hands and gas masks covering their faces. The date was Sunday, March 7, 1965.
Lewis and the 600 other African Americans with him set out to march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, the state capital, to demand the right to vote. The state troopers stopped them as soon as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They then swarmed the marchers in a hail of tear gas and thwacks from those billy clubs. The violence of “Bloody Sunday” forced the marchers back over the bridge. Perhaps most importantly, it was shown on television later that night and horrified the nation.
A week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson spoke before a joint session of Congress. “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,” said Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law five months after “Bloody Sunday.” Coming after the adoption of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this was another major victory in the civil rights movement that pushed to have America’s promise of equality, opportunity and justice also apply to its black citizens.
Early on Sunday morning in Washington, Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia, stood tall in a blue sweater with his arms crossed. Now 80 years old and battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer, his eyes were fixed on a photographer’s camera high atop a D.C. sanitation truck. Under Lewis’s feet was public art with a message. Stretching behind him in bold yellow letters that can be seen from space, the two-block-long asphalt canvas reads “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”
Commissioned by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who accompanied Lewis to the site, the painting is a public response to President Trump’s nationally televised bullying of those peacefully protesting the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis. Bowser also renamed the stretch of 16th Street NW “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” Not only was it a message of affirmation, Bowser told me on the sidewalk Sunday, “We’re on 16th Street Northwest, D.C., and we also had to reclaim this street.” [Continue reading…]