Raymond Arsenault

The Publisher Says: The first full-length biography of civil rights hero and congressman John Lewis

For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940–2020) was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into “good trouble.”

In this first book-length biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis’s upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a show more Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the “conscience of Congress.”

Both in the streets and in Congress, Lewis promoted a philosophy of nonviolence to bring about change. He helped the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders plan the 1963 March on Washington, where he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Lewis’s activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care.

Arsenault recounts Lewis’s lifetime of work toward one overarching realizing the “beloved community,” an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Almost six hundred pages. That is a lot of reading time. It is also, peculiarly enough, less than I would have liked it to be because the life of Representative Lewis took place in such interesting times, and among such towering figures of US history, that I would gladly have read more.

Most all my readers know I am a committed atheist, and either know or can guess why. It is people like John Lewis, who used their christian beliefs to leave the world a better, more equitable place for as many as he could advocate for, that make me especially bitter about the sleazy rotten souled creeps who embody my idea of christians and christianity. Lewis was such a committed christian that he, the victim of a violent attack by a racist who later regretted his actions and sought forgiveness from Lewis, referred to the man as his brother in a television appearance they made together. This is a prime example of what a friend of Lewis’s called his "moral jujitsu," a means of wrong-footing the hate-spewing opponents who confidently expected him to return fire.

Author Arsenault sites Lewis in his historical milieu with thorough, fully attributed research. He has relied on personal sources who knew him. Thus they, who were there, can give him the real flavor of a Jim Crow rural Alabama upbringing, one filled with the ritual humiliations and deprivations so beloved of our scumbag brethren the white nationalists. While this did radicalize young Lewis, his christian beliefs channeled his radicalism into a serach for justice, fairness, equitability, and all achieved without the rage and hate that marked his opponents. Admirable to me, and to generations of voters who returned him to Congress for much of his adult life.

His skills as a politician were honed in the arena of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which he was instrumental in forming and from whom he broke away after they began calling for "Black Power," which he saw as provocative and counterproductive with its inherent message of conflict. Lewis opposed the simple reductive sloganeering of the Civil Rights Movement in its post-MLK era. This was, after all, one of the folk who thought they would be murdered in public on Bloody Sunday, in a protest on a bridge now named after him.

What that pointed to was a fact that I, no scholar of Representative Lewis’s life and career, had never known or even considered: John Lewis was not uniformly admired among his colleagues because he favored the cause of human rights over narrowly construed civil rights. He was, for example, taken to task for his vocal opposition to the confirmation of the Supreme Court’s first Black justice, Clarence Thomas...and how right he was about that! He was also a QUILTBAG ally in a community that does not, as a rule, support gay rights...at least not publicly. He very much did, and also supported the ongoing Jewish struggle against antisemitism.

John Lewis emerges from this telling of his life’s story as a man of high principles and powerful moral certainty. It did not make him universally loved, in fact made him a figure of hatred for many, but it gave him the grace of convictions not merely held, but lived. I hope you will spend some hours with John Lewis’s spirit by reading Author Arsennault’s wonderful telling of it. There are illustrative images in the text that enrich the older reader’s memory of the times he helped shape. It is a life worth knowing more about lived in times we still feel reverberations of...though not as positive a feedback as I myownself would prefer. show less

It was, I think, fitting that I finished reading this book, by the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, on the very day that John Hope Franklin, founder of the discipline of African-American history and maker of history himself, died. (Indeed, I picked up the book and I read of his memories of hearing this concert broadcast on the radio.)

I thought that I knew this story. Marian Anderson's management wanted to book her into Constitution Hall in show more Washington, D.C., the Daughters of the American Revolution said "no" because of her race, Mrs. Roosevelt quit the DAR and Miss Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial. All that's true. But, as with most simple stories, this one is a great deal more complex, and more interesting.

Why Miss Anderson? What was it about her that made her the first African-American woman to find an honored place in the world of classical music, and draw audiences of black and white alike? More than merely her gorgeous voice and excellent musicianship, it was the choices she made of repertoire and of management that led her there. She drew from her racial heritage, but did not allow herself to be typed as a "race" singer. At home in the U.S., her manager, the famed Sol Hurok, carefully publicized her as a singer who had conquered Europe but remained an unspoiled homebody. Arsenault traces for us the trajectory of her career and shows how she achieved a position and a reputation without which this fight would have been unlikely to have occurred, much less succeeded.

How did this story become so big? Following the DAR's initial refusal of the use of Constitution Hall, the director of the music series for which Miss Anderson was to perform sought, and received, not only favorable newspaper coverage, but the assistance of the NAACP in attempting a challenge to the DAR. The politics, the manoeuvering, the deft handling of a variety of interests by people like the NAACP's Walter White make for fascinating and illuminating reading. Committees were formed, alliances made, alternatives sought. A request to use a public school auditorium was turned down, again due to policies of racial segregation.

Timing, of course, is all. And friends. When Miss Anderson had been invited to sing at the White House some months earlier, she and Eleanor Roosevelt had become friends. Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior (the Department with jurisdiction over the Lincoln Memorial) was a friend of Walter White's. When someone (it's not certain who) suggested that the Memorial be the venue for the concert, well, the rest is, indeed, history.

Since that time, we have become used to this space being used for great public events. Here the March on Washington took place. Here were protests against the Vietnam war. But this was the first time such a crowd had gathered there, in what Secretary Ickes called "this great auditorium under the sky [where] all of us are free." So it was that on Easter Sunday, 1939, a thrilled and respectful crowd of 75,000 heard Marian Anderson sing. It was a short concert, less than an hour, but its impact was great. Said Mary McLeod Bethune: "It cannot be described in words. There is no way. History may and will record it, but it will never be able to tell what happened in the hearts of the thousands who stood and listened yesterday afternoon. Something happened in all of our hearts. I came away almost walking on air. We are on the right track--we must go forward. The reverence and concentration of the throngs . . . told a story of hope for tomorrow--a story of triumph--a story of pulling together--a story of splendor and real democracy." When I read those words, quoted by Mr. Arsenault, I could not help but think how accurately they reflected my feelings as I left Grant Park on Election Night, 2008.

The story does not end that day. Miss Anderson's growing stature in the musical world (FINALLY singing at the Met) and participation in the civil rights struggle, the DAR's continued refusal to acknowledge the racial motivation in their refusal of the Hall, provide the coda.

Raymond Arsenault has written a moving, compelling and informative account of how this event came to be, how Miss Anderson came to be the right woman at the right time, and in the process has given me new insight into this moment in the history of American politics of race. show less

A long and comprehensive of Arthur Ashe's life, on and off the court. I thought I knew a lot about him; I didn't. I thought he won many more championships over more years than he did. So perhaps I knew more about him because of his activism and health issues after he actually retired from tennis. It is pretty well-written, and heavily footnoted, citing many sources and interviews. I did read some of the chapters more cursorily than others. I really enjoyed getting to "know" him better, and show more especially how his views on becoming involved in political issues and activism evolved. He was like most, or many, of us in that regard--our views change over time as we become more knowledgeable. He is one of the greats. show less

Interesting and well-written but I think some of the detail of her early career and some of the background information on black performers who preceded her could have been cut. I did learn a lot. It's a fascinating story which says a lot about America and I would recommend it to foreigners trying to understand the US. One problem is I did not get a sense of Marian Anderson as a person, which the author admits as a problem.