His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

The last chapter covers the years 1966 to 1968, when Lewis lost his post as chairman of the SNCC and became active in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Some saw the year 1965 as a turning point in the civil rights movement. The bloody attack in Selma was one more than many in the movement could bear, and they started to question the strategy of nonviolence in the face of such brutality. That summer, the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in riots when Black residents protested police behavior during the arrest of a Black man. Other cities would see race riots in the years to come, as more people decided to meet violence with violence and the slogan “Black Power” took hold.

In May 1966, at an SNCC conference in Tennessee, Lewis lost his leadership position to Stokely Carmichael. Many admired Lewis personally but thought the times had changed and passive resistance no longer worked. Some also saw him as out of touch with the organization and too focused on the political process, which they felt had failed them. On June 24, after state troopers roused and beat marchers when they camped en route, Lewis gave a speech that relied on his old themes of Christian love and nonviolence. No one was interested; some drifted away. He really felt then that he’d lost them.

The next month, Lewis packed up his things at SNCC headquarters in Atlanta and moved to New York City, where he worked for a year at the Field Foundation. In 1968, he returned to Atlanta to work for the Southern Regional Council. Early that year, he heard Robert Kennedy declare his candidacy for the Democratic nomination and thought Kennedy’s vision for America sounded like the Beloved Community. He sent Kennedy a telegram offering his help, and the candidate took him up on it. They were in Indianapolis for a rally on April 4 when word came that Martin Luther King had been killed. Lewis was already at the rally location, and Kennedy was on his way. People wondered if the rally should be canceled, but Lewis knew a crowd like that would need guidance and comfort once they learned what had happened. When Kennedy arrived, he broke the news to them and spoke extemporaneously to urge them not to lash out in anger.

Just two months later, an assassin struck again. Lewis was with Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where the candidate had just won the California primary. Lewis was upstairs in the campaign’s suite while Kennedy made a speech in the ballroom. Afterward, Kennedy cut through the kitchen on his way out, and a man waiting there shot and killed him. Meacham writes that upon seeing the events on television, Lewis “fell to the floor” (231), devastated at still another tragic death.

The Epilogue briefly outlines Lewis’s life and career since 1968 and discusses his legacy. When Lewis moved back to Atlanta to work for the Southern Regional Council, he met a woman named Lillian Miles, and they married near Christmas that year. Over the next decade, he continued his work in the movement and ran for Congress in 1977 but was defeated. In 1981, he was elected to the Atlanta City Council, and five years later he won a seat in the House of Representatives, which he held until his death in 2020.

Meacham reviews the highlights of Lewis’s political career and his steadfastness in the cause of justice. He also emphasizes that Lewis is not simply a part of an important but distant past. Instead, his legacy lives on in our society today, which has been forever changed by his actions:

The movement of which Lewis had been an integral part had done more to change America for the better than any single domestic undertaking since the Civil War, joining emancipation and women’s suffrage as brilliant chapters in an uneven yet unfolding national story (234).

Meacham believes that Lewis’s message, which was also Martin Luther King’s, is relevant for 21st-century America, noting that “[i]n many ways the nation is a product of 1965” (242). We live in a better world, in part because of Lewis and everything he fought for.

John Lewis died one month before this book was published, but he provided the author with an Afterword that keeps alive his message of love and his eternal optimism. Written at a time when America was greatly divided (as in the 1960s), with political differences tearing at the nation, Lewis’s last words urge peace and unity. His generation did it then, and this generation can do it again now, he wrote. The only choice is, in the words of Martin Luther King, “between community and chaos” (247). Lewis’s message urges readers to strive for community—for the Beloved Community he always believed in.

In an Appendix to the text, Meacham provides the results of opinion polls and statistics from the 1960s to the present day. The first section comprises 1960s surveys about the efficacy of civil rights demonstrations. They generally show large differences between Black and white respondents as to whether the demonstrations were positive or negative and effective or not effective. The second section highlights the great changes to the electorate in southern states after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The percentage of registered Black voters greatly increased, and the gap between Black and white registered voters shrank. In this way, Meacham shows the strong impact the Voting Rights Act had on American democracy in the half century since its passage.