Activists who practiced civil disobedience in the 1960s knew that their adversaries would not show them civility in return. Congressman John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was arrested 40 times between 1960 and 1966 for protesting racist laws and practices in the Jim Crow South. During Selma’s first attempt to march to Montgomery to obtain the right to vote on March 7, 1965, state soldiers and “substitute” white men beat her so severely that they fractured her head.
Lewis, who died on July 17, 2020 at the age of 80, has often spoken of what he called “serious trouble”. Being arrested for trying to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge – named after a leader of the Ku Klux Klan – is one example. Speaking at the top of the same bridge 55 years after today’s events, known as “Bloody Sunday,” he urged listeners to “get in trouble, need it, and help redeem the soul.” from America”.
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Greensboro Meal Counter Sit-Ins
Lewis’ first arrest took place during a sit-in at the lunch counter in 1960. On February 1 of the same year, four Black College students sat at a “white-only” lunch counter in a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. As expected, the staff refused to serve them; but the students refused to leave. They remained seated and remained until the closure. The next day, they came back with more students to start over.
The Greensboro sit-ins sparked a similar wave of protests in which students protested racist lunch counter policies by publicly raping them. Lewis, Diane Nash and other members of the Nashville Student Movement have started organizing sit-ins in their hometown. On February 27, Lewis sat at the lunch counter of a Woolworth in Nashville, where angry white bosses beat him and his fellow protesters and tried to remove them from their seats. When the police arrived, it was the protesters, not the attackers, who arrested them. It was the first arrest for Lewis, 20.
“I didn’t necessarily want to go to jail,” he recalls in a 1973 interview with the Southern Oral History Program. “But we knew … it would help solidify the student community and the black community as a whole.” The student community rallied. People learned that we had been arrested, and before the end of the day five hundred students had moved downtown to occupy other shops and restaurants. At the end of the day, ninety-eight of us were in jail. “
The pressure worked: This spring, meal counters in Nashville began serving black customers.
Protesters line the counter at FW Woolworth Co. during the Greensboro sit-ins.
Bettmann Archives / Getty Images
The Freedom Riders
The following year, student activists traveled south on public buses to protest the federal government’s refusal to implement the 1960 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Boynton v. Virginia that separate public transport was unconstitutional. Lewis was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who began on May 4, 1961 in Washington, DC. Many others joined the trip or started their own Freedom Rides that summer. Reverend CT Vivian, an activist from Nashville, died at the age of 95 on July 17, 2020, the same day as Lewis.
READ MORE: Follow the Freedom Riders’ journey against segregation in the age of civil rights
The first violent attack on the Freedom Riders occurred just five days after the start of their journey, when Lewis attempted to enter the “white” waiting room at the Greyhound terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina. A group of angry white men beat Lewis and two other Freedom Riders. On May 14, a white crowd in Anniston, Alabama, torched a bus carrying nine Freedom Riders, and then beat the passengers.
White mobs continued to attack Freedom Riders in Birmingham, where the city’s police commissioner arrested Lewis and his fellow travelers. The commissioner then drove them to a remote area near the Tennessee border known for Klan terrorism and left them there. In Jackson, Mississippi, police arrested Lewis, Vivian and other Freedom Riders, sending them to Parchman Farm. In the infamous state penitentiary, the guards beat them and forced them to work for free on the penitentiary’s huge farm.
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Once again, the arrests drew national attention – as activists hoped – pressuring those responsible to act. This fall, the Interstate Commerce Commission finally applied Boynton v. Virginia by requiring interstate bus services to integrate their bus seats and terminals.
The legacy of the “ good problem ”
After the Freedom Rides, Lewis continued to play a key role in the civil rights movement. In June 1963, he became president of the SNCC. The following month, he was the youngest speaker in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“We are tired of being beaten by police officers,” he told the crowd from the Lincoln Memorial. “We are tired of seeing our people locked in jail over and over again. And then you shout, “Be patient.” How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now. We don’t want to go to jail. But we will go to jail if this is the price we have to pay for love, brotherhood and true peace.
For the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Lewis “tweeted live” the day as he experienced it. “I was hit on the head by a state soldier with a baton. My legs came out of me, ”he wrote. “I thought I saw death. I thought I was going to die. Television stations broadcast the violent images across the country in 1965, pressuring the government to act by passing the Voting Rights Act later in the year.
In 1987, Lewis became a member of the United States Congress, representing the 5th District of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives. He held the position until his death in 2020. Yet, even as a member of Congress, he continued to embark on what he called “good trouble.” His last arrest was on October 8, 2013. Posting a photo online, he tweeted: “Arrest number 45, protesting for comprehensive immigration reform.”
