An Easy Fellow to Underestimate

...As far as I'm concerned," Lewis asserts, "this was the turning point of the civil rights movement...

...Unfortunately, many of those sons and daughters were unschooled in the techniques of nonviolent action," Lewis remembers...

...But how could Lewis and the other movement soldiers have expected otherwise...

...It was the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City...

...Well, it just couldn't, that's why...

...Okay, so we were wrong...

...Liberals still believe Robert F. Kennedy might have redeemed the political system had he lived to become President...

...You have changed me...

...I prefer a pilot light—the flame is nothing flashy, but once it is lit, it doesn't go out...

...After a noisy brouhaha, the national party had refused to replace the "regular" all-white Mississippi delegation with a mostly black group from the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party...

...He was a walking hair shirt, went the rap, too pure for political effectiveness...

...He had managed to irritate Mayor Andrew Young, who knew the art of compromise, and he had infuriated his Council colleagues, several of whom seemed to approach public service as an entrepreneurial exercise...

...Firecrackers go off in a flash, then leave nothing but ashes...

...The peace movement, the women's movement, the gay movement—they all have roots that can be traced back to 1964...

...From the perspective of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democrats—with their firm stand on behalf of civil rights —were on the brink of handing the Deep South to the Republicans for generations to come...

...That is because Lewis and King were Gandhian true believers...

...fanner editorial board member, Atlanta "Constitution" It was easy in the summer of 1986 to regard John Lewis as another civil rights hero who was aging badly...

...Other volunteers sacrificed in smaller ways...

...Not only did they want to prevent that, they also wanted to keep border states inside the Democratic fold...

...The first focuses on Lewis, a man of extraordinary character...

...But here he was—stocky, slow-talking, earnest—running for Congress against an old friend, the glib and handsome Julian Bond...

...We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face...

...People who are like fireworks, popping off right and left with lots of sound and sizzle, can capture a crowd, capture a lot of attention for a time," Lewis says in Walking with the Wind, his hauntingly honest memoir of the civil rights movement, "but I always have to ask, where will they be at the end...

...This book, beautifully written with Michael D'Orso, really tells two stories simultaneously...

...Back in the early '60s, Lewis and his fellow SNCC insurgents were forever annoyed by the cautious, hidebound attitudes of black icons such as Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins...

...They were firmly committed to nonviolent disobedience, and the real prize, for them, was the creation of what King called the "beloved community," a society liberated from class and racial friction...

...During a 1963 meeting at tire Justice Department RFK drew him aside, Lewis recalls, and to his utter surprise said, "'John, the young people of SNCC have educated me...

...In spite of that, he remained an easy fellow to underestimate...

...He points to a widening gap between classes and races and says: "Somewhere, sometime—and I hope in the not too distant future—someone must take the lead...

...That's doubtful, given the initial reluctance of both Robert and John F Kennedy to get involved with civil rights issues—a reluctance Lewis chronicles again and again...

...Now it seems that he has finally joined his elders in spirit...

...I have no doubt that the Mississippi Summer Project, in the end, led to the liberating of America, the opening up of our society," Lewis observes...

...For the real question is how do you steer the children of South Central Los Angeles and Harlem into America's great middle class...

...In any case, idealistic warriors seldom find a happy home for long in the mercenary world of partisan politics...

...This was also the summer that saw the abduction and brutal murder of three young civil rights workers—Michael Schwemer, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney —near Philadelphia, Mississippi...

...At the highest level— in the White House, in the Senate, in the House of Representatives—somebody needs to say, forcefully and with complete conviction, that we are one nation, we're one society, we're one people...

...Then again, he has been underestimated before...

...For inherent in the movement was a wicked paradox: The stronger it grew, the more fragile it became, and, for leaders like Lewis and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the more distant were its goals...

...For all the positive seeds that were planted that summer, however, the end result for most of the people who experienced it was pain, sorrow, frustration, and fear...

...But the problem is not simply one of neglect, nor is resolving it simply a matter of goodwill...

...Through more decades of affirmative action, social promotions and bilingual education...

...Lewis is a traditionalist on this score, an orthodox liberal, and that's too bad—because these are times that call for innovation...

...Suddenly it was enlisting in its ranks the sons and daughters of mainstream America...

...The MDFP claimed a right to be seated at the convention because it had been excluded from the state's delegateselection process...

...He was knocked unconscious during the Freedom Rides in Montgomery, suffered a skull fracture at the hands of Sheriff Jim Clark's thugs in Selma, and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in its glory years...

...Worse, most of them had little or no interest in learning these techniques...

...But after the 1961 Freedom Rides, Lewis explains, the civil rights movement began to swell rapidly from its tiny base of carefully trained demonstrators...

...Besides, hadn't they just hammered into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...The movement's high-water mark came in 1964 with the Mississippi Summer Project, a massive effort to register black voters and enlist them in the civil rights crusade...

...Now I understand.'" Today John Lewis is a fifth-term Congressman and, during one of the greatest economic booms of all time, he is once more playing the hair shirt...

...And yet, Lewis describes one moment that gives a skeptic pause...

...No one who went into Mississippi that summer came out the same...

...Now, for the first time, we had made our way to the center of the system...

...Why couldn't the MDFP take this little setback in stride...

...We're one house, the American house...

...Actually, we do speak that way—or at least President Bill Clinton does whenever he feels like resuscitating his spasmodic initiative on race...

...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer, "Newsday...

...We're one family, the American family...

...SNCC was under intense pressure, not only from senior civil rights leaders who thought it was too impetuous, but also from many of its own members who thought it was too docile...

...Until then, despite every setback and disappointment and obstacle we had faced over the years, the belief still prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen, the system would respond...

...So many people I knew personally, so many people I recraited, carne out of that summer wounded, both literally and emotionally...

...For one thing, after five years on Atlanta's City Council, he was starting to sound like a professional scold: harping about ethics, droning on about the indigent, fighting with the city's business Brahmins over a parkway that would snake past the new Jimmy Carter Presidential library...

...I'm not even sure we think that way...

...Lewis beat Bond in a hard-fought squeaker, and proved—as he has his entire life—that the path of righteousness and the path of accomplishment are not always mutually exclusive...

...Similar cross currents were whipping the other civil rights organizations...

...We don't speak that way anymore...

...This, it would turn out, would become the most significant result of the Freedom Rides: the turning toward radicalization of the movement, a militancy that would surge and swell month by month over the coming years, building pressure and tension from within, until finally it would blow, bursting the civil rights movement apart and leaving it in scattered disarray...

...So many young men and women, children really, teenagers, 18 and 19 years old, went down there so idealistic, so full of hope, and came out hardened in a way, hardened by the hurt and the hatred they saw or suffered, or both...

...The second story is a chronicle of the civil rights movement through Lewis' eyes, and the theme here is more melancholy than triumphant...

...He rose from the segregated isolation of rural Alabama to attend a Nashville seminary, and from there went on to participate in the incipient sit-ins of the early 1960s...

...Yet it wasn't Mississippi that disillusioned Lewis that summer...

...Some battles are long and hard, and you have to have staying power...

...Eventual disappointment is almost guaranteed...

...He made a lonely figure on the streets of Atlanta that summer, standing at the train stops in the early morning sunlight and passing out handbills in a dogged quest for a job we journalists could have told him he would never win...

...Or do you try something else...