The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

Lewis’s was a vision of nonviolent social change that has more in common with the martyrs of old than with the politics of a given hour. “At the moment when I was hit on the bridge and began to fall,” Lewis recalled, “I really thought it was my last protest, my last march. I thought I saw death, and I thought, ‘It’s okay, it’s all right—I am doing

King and his colleagues in the movement understood, and they had launched a voting-rights drive in Alabama in the first days of 1965. The flashpoint: Selma, Alabama, the seat of Dallas County. On Sunday, March 7, 1965, a voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery had barely begun when Alabama state troopers charged a line of nonviolent demonstrat

America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.”

Eisenhower—who,

“Now, look, I happen to know a little about leadership. I’ve had to work with a lot of nations, for that matter, at odds with each other. And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it’s usually called ‘assault’—not ‘leadership.’…I’ll tell you what leadership is. It’s persuasion—and conciliat

“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything,” Aristotle wrote. “The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.” In Christian terms, fear, according to Saint Augustine, was caused by “the loss of what we love.” Building on Augustine, Saint Thomas Aqu