Quote of the Day (John Lewis, on the Press and the Civil-Rights Movement)

“If it hadn’t been for the press, the civil-rights movement, the whole struggle would have been like a bird without wings…. For the press, it was very dangerous, especially in the American South, to be a reporter, to be there with a pen and a pad, with a camera. I saw members of the Klan and racists turning on the media, beating people, leaving them bloody, and then turning on us.”—John Lewis (1940-2020), civil rights activist and Congressman (D-GA), quoted in Jamil Smith, “‘We Cannot Lose Hope’: John Lewis Looks Forward,” Rolling Stone, May 2019

In the last four years, the media faced new dangers, including crowds egged on by a President who called reporters “enemies of the people.” His undermining of those who dared to tell the truth culminated on January 6 with a mob aiming to overthrow the legitimate electoral victory of a multi-racial coalition.

One image lingering with me from that infamous day is of an African-American Capitol Police officer standing against an overwhelmingly white mob ready to breach the building. His presence would have been impossible without the similar courage shown decades before by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and, as the latter noted, the media that covered them.

Like many people, I have had my beefs with reporters from different outlets. But without media coverage—most crucially, during January 6 and its aftermath—most Americans would not have grasped the extent of the relentless assault on liberty occurring in the last four years.

For a long time, I have seen in local libraries a Library of America anthology, Reporting Civil Rights, containing roughly 200 eyewitness accounts of the movement from 1941 to 1973. Recent events have made it more imperative than ever, I think, that I read these two volumes.

(The image accompanying this post was Lewis’ official congressional photo, taken Feb. 13, 2006.)

Photo of the Day: Singing the ‘Creative Psalm of Brotherhood’

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), Letter From a Birmingham Jail (1963)

In 1963, eight white clergymen asked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to call off demonstrations planned in Birmingham, Ala., and wait on negotiations and the courts to compel change in time. Instead, King responded with his famous "Letter," containing many of his most eloquent words.

The “vitriolic words and actions of the bad people” issued from racists blocking change in this “most segregated city in America,” and “the appalling silence of good people” represented the inaction of those who, though knowing better, continued to acquiesce in a century of American apartheid—not unlike the eight clergymen.

Reading these words the other night, however, that paragraph took on a whole different meaning for me. The “vitriolic words and actions” have come from groups suddenly empowered, after the past election, to say and do things in the open that they would not have dared over the past few decades. The “appalling silence” has settled on people who should know better—people of the best intentions who, just a few days from a quadrennial transfer of power, keep hoping, daily evidence to the contrary, that the President-elect will stop making petty statements and creating an American oligarchy to match the one in Russia.

Now, Donald Trump, instead of inviting Rep. John Lewis to break bread, chooses to disregard the movement that gave rise to the congressman and Dr. King, to insult Lewis for his 30 years on Capitol Hill, and to exaggerate the problems in his district. (It's unlikely that he took seriously proposals made in a meeting today with Dr. King's son to expand restrictions on voting.)

Forget about a “creative psalm of brotherhood”—Trump can’t even maintain elementary norms of civility. If these norms can be broken, can the laws that moved America forward these last 50 years, past “the forces of social stagnation,” be far behind?

The image accompanying this quote, which I took a little over three years ago, comes, of course, from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in West Potomac Park. (The fact that a Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin, was chosen powerfully illustrates King’s message of freedom and brotherhood that transcends heritage and borders.) I’d tell Trump to visit the memorial some time, except that he’d probably treat the occasion as a photo op (much like the Trump Tower talk with Martin Luther King III today) rather than a learning experience.

More transformative would be reading a King biography or listening to a King speech. But that might compel a prolonged reflection that this 70-year-old man-child appears to have never engaged in throughout his adult life. Then again, as Dr. King wrote, “the time is always ripe to do right.”

Quote of the Day (John Lewis, on JFK and MLK)

“After Dr. [Martin Luther] King had spoken, we went back down to the White House. President Kennedy invited us back down, and he stood in the door to the Oval Office and greeted each one of us. He was like a proud beaming father that everything had gone so well. He said to each one of us as he shook our hand, You did a good job, you did a good job. And when he got to Dr. King, he said, And you had a dream.”—Congressman John Lewis remembering the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, quoted in “One March,” Time Magazine, August 26-September 2, 2013 issue

(The photo accompanying this post, by Cecil W. Stoughton, shows President Kennedy meeting with the leaders of the March on Washington.)