After the two civil rights giants both died last Friday, we should lament that this nation continues to require their kind of heroism
The passing of civil rights leaders such as Lewis and the Rev. C.T. Vivian — Lewis’ 95-year-old movement collaborator who died in hospice care hours earlier that same day — typically provokes tributes and recollections of their courage against unimaginable violence and degradation. Tales of their stoic nonviolent resistance to racist violence visited upon their bodies and minds fill our publications and social media feeds.
These two men risked their lives in Selma for my right as an African American to have a say in this democracy, such that it is. In March of 1965, two weeks before the Voting Rights Act was introduced, Lewis famously suffered a skull fracture there as Alabama state troopers ambushed a protest march to Montgomery atop the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
As if to provide a parting insult, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority exacerbated the very problem of voter discrimination that Lewis and Vivian fought against with a disastrous ruling on the eve of their deaths. The Court’s conservative majority all but deprived more than one million formerly incarcerated — and newly re-enfranchised — Floridians of the vote, the majority of whom are black and Latino.
When I spoke with Lewis in his office in January of 2019, he openly called President Trump a racist and said of racism itself, “Every so often this deeply embedded sickness raises its ugly head in different forms and fashion. We try to sweep it under the rug, we try to sweep it into some dark corner. But we must continue to do what we can to bury it so that it never rises again. To wash it from the shores of America.
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