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

“To John Lewis, the truth of his life—a truth he had lived out on that bridge in 1965—was of a piece with the demands of the gospel to which he had dedicated his life since he was a child. He was moved by love, not by hate. He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.”

Right from the start, Meacham makes it clear how important he thinks Lewis is to American history, equating Lewis with several founding fathers. It’s a claim that he continues to try to prove through the story of Lewis’s role in the civil rights movement. In the Epilogue, the author states his case: Lewis played a large role in the events that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislation that profoundly changed America.

“Remedying four centuries of slavery, of segregation, and of inequality of opportunity is no simple matter. The witness of a Lewis and of a King and a Malcolm and a host of others was—and is—necessary to reform a nation in which racist ideas still prevail. Experience tells us that the task is staggeringly difficult. Lewis approached the work one way; many others choose different routes. In the fourth century, arguing against Christians who wanted to remove an altar to the pagan deity Victory, the Roman writer Symmachus noted, ‘We cannot attain to so great a mystery by one way.’

Nor can America attain racial, economic, and political justice in only one way. This book is about John Lewis and his vision, which was also the vision of Martin Luther King, and which changed, in a limited but real sense, how America saw itself. When the nation sees differently, it enhances its capacity to act differently. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, America has gradually expanded who’s included when the country speaks of ‘We the People.’”

Here in the Overture, Meacham notes the theme of racism in the United States. He refers to how its tenacious hold continues to this day and says that many approaches are needed to overcome it. The approach that this book describes is that of John Lewis and Martin Luther King: nonviolent resistance. Meacham emphasizes Lewis’s importance in making Americans view themselves more expansively and thereby helping create a more democratic nation.

“‘Sometimes I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them come and walk in my shoes,’ Lewis said at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington in 2013. ‘Come walk in the shoes of those who were attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail.’ Yet as often as Lewis was asked to look back, to tell the old stories and, in a sense, sing the old songs, he was always looking ahead, past the foot of the bridge and along the highway to come. He lived in hope.”

This quotation helps illustrate the real, meaningful changes that Lewis and others in the civil rights movement effected. Lewis, whose great-grandfather was born a slave, grew up in poverty in rural Alabama.