March: Books 2 & 3

Many of the enduring images of nonviolent resistance during the civil rights movement convey a sense of quiet defiance. Prominent examples include Rosa Parks casually looking out the window of a “whites-only” bus seat, the Greensboro Four calmly sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, and Martin Luther King Jr. looking contemplatively through the bars of his Birmingham jail cell. To its detractors, nonviolence was too passive to deal with the evils of white supremacy. In his famous 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X mocked the idea of a revolution where people lock arms and sing “We Shall Overcome,” saying, “You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging.” In March, John Lewis demonstrates that there was nothing passive about nonviolence, and the maintenance of a reserved dignity required extraordinary forbearance in the face of horrific violence.

Nonviolence as a Way of Life is a theme throughout Lewis’s story, as the South treated Black people not merely as second-class citizens but as beings who were less than human. Under Jim Crow, Black people were not merely denied voting rights and relegated to segregated facilities. When they tried to assert their dignity, the system did everything in its power to enforce their subordination. The police could act with wanton brutality without any accountability, enabled by a court system charged with upholding the laws of segregation. Ordinary citizens could harass or attack protesters however they pleased, with the implicit and often explicit support of the state. To its Black citizens, the Jim Crow South was for all intents and purposes an authoritarian regime whose laws existed not to protect them but to bind them.

As Lewis recounts, nonviolent resistance was a gruesome, exhausting affair. The idea of The Civil Rights Movement as a Revolution emerges as the book depicts the intensity of the response to the nonviolent protests that he participated in and eventually led. When there was only a small group of activists, a single police action could suspend the movement while its members languished in jail. Arrest records would make it even harder for these young people to find jobs, and in many cases (including Lewis’s) inflamed tensions within their own families. Activists enduring such sacrifices also had to confront the seemingly impossible odds of their task. Simply by buying bus tickets, pairs of Freedom Riders activated a vast network against them, capable of summoning a police intercept or an angry mob at a moment’s notice. As a movement leader, Lewis had to bear the responsibility of sending people to endure terrible treatment, with a seemingly minimal chance of success. Although these people were volunteers and the movement tried to avoid firm hierarchies, leaders were still necessary to maintain discipline and ensure the movement stayed together and upheld its core values. Like a commanding officer, Lewis had to knowingly send people into harm’s way with no certainty of success, driven by the certainty of failure if they did not act.

As the movement gained greater public attention, particularly with the Freedom Riders, Lewis’s dilemmas as a leader became more severe. By traveling from state to state, Freedom Riders were launching a much broader attack on segregation than any efforts to desegregate within a single city. A broader stage meant a wider audience, including the federal government, which would have to step in to enforce its own laws if the protests were to have any hope of success. The prospect of federal intervention would then compel local and state officials to smash the protest movement once and for all. The best-case scenario was that the ensuing carnage would prompt the government to action, but Lewis realized that one, two, or even more bloody confrontations would not be sufficient. The government would never retaliate for what happened in the past; it would only act to prevent something worse from happening in the future. Therefore, every time Lewis and his followers bandaged their wounds, left jail, and in some cases buried their friends, they had to prepare themselves to do it all over again. The theme of Radicalism Versus Moderation arises as the book depicts Lewis choosing this approach throughout his life, despite pressure to revolt in more a violent fashion. Even in the face of mounting frustration from the Black community and disdain from white society, Lewis insisted that the government would eventually have to bear the burden of forcing the Southern states to become genuine democracies. Otherwise, it would expose the hollowness of its own authority.