Sublime

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

In the middle of the last century, Lewis marched into the line of fire to summon a nation to be what it had long said it would be but had failed to become. Arrested forty-five times over the course of his life, Lewis suffered a fractured skull and was repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed. He led by example more than by words. He was a peaceful soldier

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

In Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural, the new president appealed, eloquently but theoretically, to “the better angels of our nature.” John Lewis is a better angel. The American present and future may in many ways hinge on the extent to which the rest of us can draw lessons from his example.

“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”