Editorial | John Lewis: On the right side of history

The death last week of John Lewis, the black American congressman, was recorded but wasn’t big news in Jamaica. It should have been. Especially at this time, in the context of the Black Lives Matter-inspired global demonstrations against systemic racism against black people and the coronavirus pandemic, whose victims in the United States are disproportionately people of colour who include members of the Jamaican diaspora.

For while John Lewis, 80, was a Democratic member of the House of Representative for 34 years, his history, purpose, and inclination made him something more profound than a politician in the traditional sense of that calling. His mission was justice, writ large. The reference to him as “the conscience of Congress” was not misplaced.

For courage alone, Mr Lewis ought to have been famous. The use to which he put that courage, moral and physical, however, was not only inspirational, but brought real value to black people in the United States and to people seeking justice globally.

The son of Alabama sharecroppers, who grew up in Jim Crow South, John Lewis became an icon of the black civil rights movement of the 1960s as an acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr and his non-violent campaign for change. Indeed, at 23, Mr Lewis, as president of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was the youngest speaker at Dr King’s historic March on Washington in 1965.

But even before then, he was in the thick of the civil rights movement and was to become one of its defining personalities. In 1961, for instance, he was among the first ‘freedom riders’, the black and white activists who challenged segregation in interstate travel in America’s South. He was often beaten bloody and arrested. Later, as head of SNCC, he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, which also led to beatings and arrests.

CEMENTED ICONIC STATUS

What happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, underlined John Lewis’ physical and moral courage and cemented his iconic status in the civil rights movement. He was leading 600 demonstrators across the bridge. The marchers were charged and beaten by police.

Mr Lewis was not only severely beaten, but had his skull cracked. The image of the attack on non-violent protesters revolted many Americans and helped fast-track President Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, aimed at removing Jim Crow impediments to voting, including literacy tests, by black people.

Forty-three years after the Voting Rights Act, America voted for its first black president in Barack Obama, which Mr Lewis acknowledged as “an unbelievable period in our history”, but understood didn’t uproot 400 years of entrenched, institutional racism, exemplified in events like black George Floyd’s killing by a white policeman, who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. Or the fact that a typical white family in the US is nearly 10 times wealthier than a black one; that on average, white workers earn more than a fifth more than black ones; or that a differential still exists when black and white workers have a similar experience, education, and training.

SHARED HERITAGE

The social and economic consequences of black poverty contribute to worse health outcomes for blacks as well as put them in jobs where they are at greater risk of being infected with the coronavirus. So while black people are 13 per cent of the US population, they account for nearly a quarter of COVID-19 deaths. These things matter to Jamaica. For the shared heritage between the majority of Jamaicans and America’s black population elicits kinship. Moreover, the US is an economic partner and neighbour, where many Jamaicans live.

Further, in normal times, America’s economic, political, and moral leadership commands global respect. That authority is no longer the presumed natural order, having been weakened, and made unpredictably dangerous, by the nihilistic, white ethnocentric and xenophobic presidency of Donald Trump.

In the moral vacuum of the Trump presidency, the logic of John Lewis’ principles was indisputable as was the sensibleness of his support for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the US and elsewhere. Last year, when he voted to impeach President Trump, Mr Lewis said: “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something, to do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ ... . We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”

On most things, including Donald Trump, John Lewis was on the right side of history. Jamaica should strive to stand with him.