By Rev. Dr. Wendell Anthony, President, Detroit Branch NAACP
Every now and then we are paused by the voices that reside in the corners of our conscious. In the words of Congressman John Robert Lewis, “when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, do something about it. Say something. Have the courage. Have the backbone. Get in the way. Walk with the wind. It’s all going to work out.” John Lewis walked with the wind. He got in the way of injustice and discrimination. He had the courage to speak up and the backbone to stand up against forces standing in the way of human progress. He moved from share cropping to dishwashing to pay his college tuition. He would become a congressional legislator serving 33 years in the U.S. House of Representatives. John Lewis stands as a symbol of grace and power. He exemplifies the words found in the old testament book of Micah, “what does the Lord require of thee?” His very life answers the mandate to “do justice, love mercy and to walk humbly with our God,” Micah 6:8. John Lewis reminded us that, “part of the effort of the movement was to tame the madness of men to take the beast that lives in all of us and turn it towards love to show human kind a different way of compassion, of connection, and community of peace and non-violence. No, you can’t take an eye for an eye. If you do, we will all be blind.”
Congressman Lewis has received countless medals and awards. Among them the NAACP Chairman’s Award to the Presidential Medal of Freedom given to him by the first Black president, that he enabled the nation to realize. One could feel his passion when he appeared at the Detroit Branch NAACP’s 56th Annual Fight For Freedom Fund Dinner in 2011. Everyone wanted to touch and take a picture with him. Everyone wanted to connect with the man who survived Bloody Sunday. They wanted to stand next to the man who stood with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., ushering into reality the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. His level of activism and political consciousness continued until the time of his death. John Lewis consistently marched for justice and even organized a sit-in on the floor of congress with 170 lawmakers in 2016 in the fight over gun control. He said, “by sitting in we were really standing up.” He was “the boy from Troy” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called him, bent on joining the freedom movement at age 17.
As the nation ponders how to honor and remember the lives of C.T. Vivian and now John Robert Lewis, we must continue their good works. Perhaps the nation should change the name of the bridge splattered on that Bloody Sunday from Edmund Pettus, an officer in the confederate army and a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan, to the John R. Lewis Bridge for Justice, a freedom fighter and a nation builder. It was not just their concerns for social justice that inspired them to go forward. It was their faith that compelled them to never stop. According to John Lewis, from his book Across That Bridge, “freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is a continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.” John Robert Lewis for 80 years did his part. Thank you for disturbing with “good trouble” the consciousness of our nation.
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