Title: 'John Lewis: A Life' (Full Bio)

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Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today we start with the book John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg. Greenberg is a professor at Rutgers University and has written biographies of former presidents Richard Nixon and Calvin Coolidge. Now he takes on an icon of the civil rights movement, John Lewis, who fought for integration and voters rights. Here's Congressman Lewis from 2018 in front of Congress on the power of voting.

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John Lewis: In a democracy, the right to vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have. Many people marched and protested for the right to vote. Some gave a little blood and others lost their lives. Some of you have heard me say that the right to vote is precious, almost sacred in my hearts of hearts. I believe that we should make it simple and convenient for all of our citizens to be part of the democratic process.

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Alison Stewart: We begin today before he was a congressman, when John Robert Lewis was a Southern bookish kid who dreamed of being a preacher until he went to college in Nashville and became part of the sit-in movement to integrate lunchrooms. Let's get this started with David Greenberg, the author of John Lewis: A Life.

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Alison Stewart: David, you worked on this book with John Lewis for a year or two. How did you come to meet him?

David Greenberg: It took some effort. I didn't know him at all when I started the project. I really wanted his cooperation even before I wrote the book proposal because I just, I just knew it would be a better book to both have interviews with him, but then also the cooperation of friends and family, which would be a lot easier if he were on board. It was just a long belabored process of thinking who do I know who might know someone who knows John Lewis, and phone calls and emails. He was, at the time, a very busy man. When I finally did get my first interview with him, it was early 2019.

The week before he had done the coin toss at the super bowl in Atlanta. The day after I met with him, he had flown to Los Angeles to introduce the film Green Book at the Oscars. Between the Oscars and the Super Bowl, he found a little time for me. We did an initial interview. Then I had a couple of follow-up interviews with him later on, but by then he was already ill, sad to say, and it was COVID times so we did them by phone. Yet still, I'm grateful to have met him and to have had that opportunity.

Alison Stewart: You interviewed 250 people for this book, from President Obama to Speaker Pelosi. What were you looking for from the people you interviewed?

David Greenberg: This was really a combination of historical archival work and more journalistic interviewing work. Having been a journalist before I became a historian, it was really great to be able to use both sets of skills. Sometimes you really have to trust the paper and the documents. People's memories of things long ago tend to be imperfect, and archival material can often set the record straight. For the more recent years, there was a lot less documentation available. His congressional papers had not yet been sorted or donated anywhere.

Really, especially for the last 34 years or so, his years in Congress and even the years in Atlanta before that, the interviews were just indispensable in understanding what the important moments were in his congressional career. I would say even more so interviewing his friends, close friends of his and his wife's, staff members. I just got a feel for him as a person.

Little qualities, the way he loved playing with children and in his congressional office would, sit down on the rug and play Legos with young visitors, or his love of art. He became a tremendous collector of African American art, something that really hadn't been written about much at all. I talked to people who enjoyed his art in his house, his art dealer, an auction house representative he worked with. Those kind of interviews were really indispensable.

Alison Stewart: Let's start at the beginning. John Robert Lewis was born in southeast Alabama on February 12, 1940, to Willie Mae and Eddie Lewis. He was their 10th child. What was John Lewis like as a little boy?

David Greenberg: It was a very hard life, as people might imagine, born into really abject poverty in 1940s in rural Alabama. They worked hard on the farm. The family had scraped together enough to own their own land, which was something of achievement. They still were out there every day, picking cotton, peanuts, corn. Lewis, from an early age, decided he did not like the life of the farm, and it was not going to be his future. He was drawn instead to school. He was also, from a young age, just a voracious reader, again, something readers might not know, that they'll get from this book.

He first was reading the Bible, but then became interested in current affairs and biography, and politics, and poetry. There were days when his parents said, you have to stay home from school to work on the farm because it's in harvest time. He would hide under the porch, wait until the bus pulled up in front of the house and then dart out to catch the bus to school. Some kids would trick their parents and skip school. John Lewis did the opposite.

Alison Stewart: As a child, he was put in charge of the chickens on the farm. You write that he would preach to them. Do you have any idea about what?

David Greenberg: This is a famous story that he loved to tell. It captures something eccentric about John Lewis as a boy. First, there was his devotion to the church and he wanted to be a minister. This was a way of play acting as a young minister with these chickens literally as his flock. It also, I think, speaks to his love of all things living and his recognition of even these chickens as God's creatures, as he understood it.

He would read Bible verses, he would just give the kind of prayers you might in an ordinary sermon. He performed funerals when a chicken would die and he would have all his brothers and sisters, sometimes his cousins, there were a lot of family nearby, their own land, who would come. He'd have them all participate as the chicken got a burial. It was a very elaborate set of rituals for him. He talked about it his whole life.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Greenberg. He's written John Lewis: A Life. It's our choice for Full Bio. You write that he really had never had interaction with white children when John Lewis was little. When did he actually realize this?

David Greenberg: The exact age is not clear. He does say in some of these oral histories I found, and I found in archives really some magnificent oral histories of hundreds of pages where he talks really at great length about his childhood, so in a couple places, yes, he says as a young boy, he had virtually or no interaction with whites. That appears to change in childhood. They live near a town called Troy, which is a small town but not tiny. In Troy, there are whites and Blacks. He begins there to discover just what it means to live in a ruthlessly segregated society.

If he wants to go to the movies with his brothers and sisters, they all have to sit up in the balcony seating where the main seating is reserved for whites. I mentioned he was such a reader. He went to borrow books from the library, was told, you can't because you're Black. He actually tries to mount a petition drive and get friends and others to appeal the library, some early civil rights activism. He's certainly around whites and white society enough as a boy to start, more than noticing, but really feeling the hurt and the humiliation, and the injustice of the system that Alabama, Mississippi, were really the worst of it in the south and in the United States.

Alison Stewart: The Lewis family sought to be a quiet family. They didn't want any trouble. We all know his famous saying about good trouble. Seriously, what kind of trouble were they afraid of?

David Greenberg: It was trouble that his mother in particular, but his father too, were concerned about. Look, they must have hated segregation and the racial oppression as much as he did. They and many others of that generation knew the very fearsome consequences that could happen from trying to challenge it. Lewis had a relative, really an uncle of an uncle or something like that who had been shot because he'd become active in the NAACP. The Lewises, by and large, felt it was better to keep your head down. Love your family, do your work, be part of the church, try to provide the best life you can for yourselves and your family.

When John Lewis wanted to challenge the system, whether it was as a young boy demanding better school buses, another early civil rights protest, or then especially when he goes off to Nashville and gets involved as a young seminarian in the early civil rights movement there, they're very concerned he could go to jail, he could get hurt. He did get hurt. Of course, he did go to jail. All of this, they thought this was going to lead him to ruin. This was going to lead him-- going to jail--

Alison Stewart: It's a big deal.

David Greenberg: It's a big deal. Now we say John Lewis went to jail for a noble cause, and we admire and respect it, but you tell a woman like Willie Mae Lewis that her son's going to wind up in jail, it's not something she's going to be proud of.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Greenberg. He has written John Lewis: A Life. It's our choice for Full Bio. John Lewis would be the first in his family to go to college. When he was at the Greyhound bus terminal getting ready to go to Nashville, his father dropped him off, they shook hands, and you write, "From a seat in the back of the bus, Lewis pressed his face against the window, hoping for a final moment of eye contact. His father had already driven away." What was his father thinking about school? Was he not approving of it? What was going on?

David Greenberg: I think there was an understanding that this was the beginning of a real separation. Of course John Lewis did remain close with his family. Later in life, he was always going home for holidays and family reunions, but his going off to Nashville marked a break. He was 18 years old, leaving home. Other than one trip to Buffalo as a young teenager, which was an important experience for him, really had not been away from home. I think there was a sense for him and for his father that he'd always talked about doing bigger things, doing better things, finding a brighter future than this life on the farm, and there was a sense that that was about to begin.

Alison Stewart: He arrived at the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Originally, what was John Lewis's goal with his studies?

David Greenberg: He was a very devout young man, as I mentioned. He actually had already in high school been ordained as a minister. He was there to learn about Christianity, theology, homiletics, be trained as a minister. Pretty early on, he realizes that unlike some of the boys at school who want to become ministers and go home and lead a congregation in their small town, he's left cold by the pure religion business, saving souls, as he calls it.

Alison Stewart: Is that when he had to decide to be a whooper versus someone who believes in the social gospel? A whooper's someone who's given himself to emotional parts of faith, and the social gospel are people who bring in the current events.

David Greenberg: Exactly. For him, he has professors who are also leading ministers in town, including a very important man named Kelly Miller Smith, who is part of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Under the tutelage of Smith, CT Vivian, and then a bit later a man named James Lawson who's a divinity student at Vanderbilt, he really throws himself into the social gospel, as you say, which is applying the teachings of Christ to the social and political problems, particularly of segregation and racial discrimination, and oppression.

It's a whole movement. Of course, King, we know Martin Luther King is associated with this movement, but there's many other ministers around the South and indeed in other parts of the country too who are achieving this fusion of political change and Christian doctrine, as well as with Gandhian nonviolence, an important part of the mix. All of this really appeals to John Lewis in his late teens, early 20s.

Alison Stewart: The mentors included, like you said, Reverend Kelly Smith, the minister of First Colored Baptist Church in Nashville, James Lawson as well. Now, they were part of the movement that is called, I hope I say this correct, please correct me if I'm wrong, satyagraha. The idea of it is the form of nonviolent protest. Why did this appeal to John Lewis? He's a kid.

David Greenberg: It's interesting what the connection was for him. James Lawson, who died last summer, but who I had had the privilege to interview, told me that by the time John Lewis came into his workshops, he was already ripe. I remember he used that word, "ripe". That there was something in John Lewis that already had oriented him toward embracing this set of teachings and practices, and indeed what Lewis would call a way of life. Some of that was an affinity for Martin Luther King, whom Lewis had heard deliver a sermon on the radio back in 1954, 1955, around the time of the historic Montgomery bus boycott, when King and others had led a fight to desegregate the city's buses.

Some of it was he's already attracted to King. I think there was also something temperamentally that drew Lewis. People described him as just the gentlest of souls, a sweet, kind, caring person, someone who is capable of deep wells of forgiveness. According to satyagraha and Gandhi, and nonviolence, the idea is not just that you, as a tactical matter, refrain from violence. There were many others in the movement who saw it tactically.If you're sitting on a lunch counter stool and some white thug beats you up that's captured the newspapers, you look sympathetic, he looks offensive, and it helps sway opinion.

For Lewis and for his teachers, it was deeper. You actually were supposed to get yourself to love your assailant. That's something a lot of people would not necessarily be capable of. Lewis was. It was in his character that he-- again, it's almost like with the chickens. He saw everyone as one of God's creatures. We all have a humanity in us. He really held out hope that even these people who were resorting to violence to uphold Jim Crow and the white supremacist order could eventually have their hatred break down, and love would conquer that and bring them to see the humanity in everyone.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Greenberg. He wrote John Lewis: A Life. It is our choice for Full Bio. Let's talk about the sit-ins in Nashville. Students decide to take Nashville's segregation of lunch counters as well as department stores to task. What they would do is they would go in, they would sit fairly quietly. The escalation of events included being thrown out of places, having coffee dumped on them, to brutal violence. From your reporting, why did it escalate in such a way?

David Greenberg: In a way, it was by design. They could have gone in and just sat there, and if no one reacted, then there would be no news story, there would be no public attention to it. It might become a conflict with the store owners here and there. In a way, the hope was that the deep anger toward these efforts would provoke a confrontation, so they would return time and time again. Sometimes the resistance was just the store owners would put up garbage cans or other things on the counters as if to say, it's closed, you can't sit here.

Then other times, people who were quite ready to take matters into their own hands, or these local vigilante types, usually young men, sometimes not even from Nashville but from outlying areas, they would come in and start beating up these kids on the bar stools. That, of course, did galvanize attention. What would happen at first is it would be the Black students and their white allies who would be carted off to jail, often not the assailants. The students would be charged with trespassing or other kinds of misdemeanors. There would be attention to their trial.

They often took the strategy of forswearing bail so they were remaining in the jails, and that would present a problem for local police. How long do we want all these college students clogging up our jails over this political protest? Then think too that this is spreading across the South. Nashville is one of the first cities to really get going with the sit-in movement. They start in the late winter and early spring of 1960, spring up everywhere.

This too really galvanizes the nation. John F. Kennedy, who is running for president on the Democratic ticket, endorses the sit-ins, says the way of standing up for your rights is sitting down. His support for the sit-in movement and for Martin Luther King that fall is a big reason he does so well with the Black vote and wins the presidency. They're starting to see political change both at the local level by, say, getting the stores, the five and dimes in Nashville to desegregate, but even starting to see it in national politics.

Alison Stewart: John Lewis was at the head of these sit-ins. It started to grow. The number of people started to grow, and he worried about maintaining discipline. He had the instructions typed up by a friend's wife. It said, if you go on one of these sit-ins, that you one, you do not strike back or curse if so abused. You do not hold conversation with the floor walker. You do not leave your seat until your leader has given you permission to do so. You do have to show yourself as courtesy and friendly at all times. Sit straight, always face the counter. Report all serious incidents to your leader. As it grew, as the civil rights demonstrations grew, how did they maintain order? These were young men and women.

David Greenberg: This was a real challenge because the initial group of maybe 20 or even a bit more in the Nashville organization had been training for months before they did any sit-ins. They were really steeped in these teachings. James Lawson and other ministers like Metz Rollins and Andrew White would lead them and helping them develop this discipline. Once the thing starts getting popular, new students are rushing to join the movement. They want to be a part of this too. They, of course, haven't been through the months of training.

They haven't been reading Gandhi and reading King. Lewis and others are worried, will they stick to the rules? If a few students, all it takes is a few start hitting back, then that immediately changes the storyline. It changes the whole picture and the perceived moral equation that outsiders will be seeing. Lewis takes it upon-- He's a very serious young man, even you might say a bit moralistic. Some of his friends said uptight, and they would tease him about that. He and his friend, Bernard Lafayette, who also goes on to be an important figure in the movement, type up, as you say, have it typed up, this list of rules.

These days, respectability politics has acquired a bad name, but they really thought this was important. They thought it was important to be dressed in your Sunday best, to be impeccably polite and decent, to show yourself better than the people who were attacking you and that you were not going to descend to their level, to their base instincts, not just of violence, but of other ways of degrading other human beings.

You couldn't curse, you couldn't be nasty toward other people. You had to just model impeccable behavior. To a remarkable degree, they managed to do so. As the movement grew and there were people who were less committed, it didn't always stick. By and large, the Nashville movement and some of these other sit-in movements succeeded because they did stick to adhering to those very high standards.

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Alison Stewart: We're going to look at 1961 and the Freedom Riders they were following up on the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia which basically said there shouldn't be segregation in interstate bus terminals. You write that Lewis needed no persuading to become a Freedom Rider. We tend to think of John Lewis as a civil rights leader, but at this moment in his life, where is he?

David Greenberg: He's still a college student. This is 1961. He's 21 years old. They're fresh off this victory from 1960 with the sit-ins, although there's a lot more work to be done in Nashville even after that first year. My book actually gives a much more detailed account than we've had in other civil rights histories of the years of '61, '62, '63, where Lewis is fighting in Nashville.

He learns of a project sponsored by a group called CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, that is going to have Black and white teams of riders go from Washington, DC, all the way through the upper South, the deep South, winding up in New Orleans to test the Supreme Court ruling that says you cannot segregate not only the buses, but also the bus terminals and the dinettes at the bus stations and so on, which were routinely being violated across the South. John Lewis just-- I think it's Metz Rollins, who's one of the ministers in the Nashville group, he just knows John Lewis would be perfect for this, that this would be his kind of project.

Even though he needs to cut out of his school semester and maybe wind up missing graduation, he decides that this is something he wants to do. John Lewis is a member of that original freedom rides leg. Then he actually leaves the trip for a couple of days because he's under consideration for a fellowship to study abroad, much as Jim Lawson had, either in India or he really wants to go to Tanzania. While he's away, one of the buses is firebombed by a group of Klansmen and white vigilantes in Anniston, Alabama.

Then the other bus is met with violence when it arrives in Birmingham. The violence is so bad, so horrific, that the leaders of the freedom ride decide they're going to abandon the project. At this point, Lewis has returned to Nashville. For a moment, he's with all his old friends. It's these students, 21-year-old, 20-year-old, who decide, no, the show must go on. They, the Nashville movement, revive the freedom rides, get people together to continue them and carry it through to completion.

Alison Stewart: Those who participated in the freedom rides, they wrote wills and letters to their families. They were really headed into danger. What was the level of danger for these young adults?

David Greenberg: Look, especially after that Anniston bus bombing where someone threw a Molotov cocktail onto the bus and the whole thing erupted in flames. After that, they knew that their lives were very much on the line. John Lewis had been beat up once already in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

Alison Stewart: Can I stop you there? Can you describe the scene in South Carolina where he was beaten up?

David Greenberg: That was actually one of the lesser ones. It is early on in the freedom rides. Go into the bus station is their plan. He goes into the white area, the white waiting room area, the white restroom area. There's a few young thugs there. One of them is a man named Elwin Wilson, who's a member of the Klan. They probably all are clan members, a lot of young guys would just join the Klan like that. Lewis gets slugged in the mouth, falls to his knees. He's bleeding.

Then his white seatmate, a somewhat older man named Albert Bigelow, who was a peace activist and the former hockey player at Harvard, he steps up. They start pounding on him too. A young woman then steps up. They hit her. At that point, the police finally put a stop to it. John Lewis says, no, we don't want to press charges because these people too are a victim of a system, of a corrupt segregationist system. They go on their way, Lewis with his bloody mouth.

Years later, I'll just digress to tell this story. The same man, Elwin Wilson, just after the inauguration of Barack Obama, is feeling this remorse over how he treated these people, and he realizes the wrong. He realizes the evil of his former beliefs. Anyway, through an intermediary at the local paper, he gets in contact with Lewis's office. They're on Good Morning America, where he apologizes, he cries, Lewis forgives him.

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Elwin Wilson: I'm sorry for what happened down there.

John Lewis: It's okay. It's all right. It's almost 48 years ago.

Elwin Wilson: That's right.

John Lewis: You remember that day, Will?

Elwin Wilson: I tried to get it out of my mind.

Moderator: Did you ever imagine this moment?

John Lewis: I never thought that this would happen. It says something about the power of love, the power of grace, and the power of people to be able to say I'm sorry.

[audio playback ends]

David Greenberg: In a way, it does show Lewis is right about nonviolence, that you can change people's hearts. Maybe it takes 47 years, but it can work. Lewis is quite ready to endure this violence. I found this remarkable press conference, I think it's his first national press conference, where he's there with Martin Luther King and James Farmer, and some of these other titans of the movement. He's asked, John Lewis is asked about the violence he's going to confront. He says very frankly, look, I don't want to die. It's not like I'm going into this wanting to die, but I'm ready to die because I believe in this cause of human equality and freedom.

It's an incredibly mature and courageous thing for a young man to be saying with such kind of equanimity. Then, of course, he does go on to endure even worse violence. Once the freedom rides are revived in Montgomery, in particular, the local police basically get out of town. They hide out while a mob is awaiting the Freedom Riders. When they arrive in the Montgomery bus station, there's a full-on riot.

Lewis is smashed over the head with a Coca Cola crate. Another friend of his, William Barbie, is beaten so badly he had permanent brain damage. So this is, , this is not just getting smacked around. He nearly lost his life then, as he nearly lost it again in later years. It took an immense amount of courage and dedication to the cause to know you could face that kind of violence and even death, and go forward with it anyway.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Greenberg. We're talking about his book, John Lewis: A Life. It's our choice for Full Bio. I want to finish up with the Freedom Riders by talking about the Kennedy administration, who was not on board. How did the Kennedy administration help or hinder the ride, and when did they truly get involved?

David Greenberg: The Kennedys initially, and of course, John F. Kennedy's president, his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, is the attorney general, and by and large they are trying to, in small and modest ways, advance the cause of desegregation and of equality, but it's a politically tough time because the Democratic Party at this point is still very much dependent on the South which votes Democratic, and they need these Southerners as part of their coalition. They're moving quite slowly. When the freedom rides begin, they tell the Justice Department, okay, we'll keep an eye on things.

They're nominally supportive. After that Anniston bus bombing and after that horrific violence, the Kennedys say, look, we need a cooling-off period. It's not that they're siding with the segregationists. They just see, is this a provocation? Do you really need to go in and stir up trouble. Can't we find a behind-the-scenes way to try to get these goals achieved? Of course, John Lewis and his fellow activists believe that unless they're out there in what they call direct action, then the Justice Department will go slow. They'll back off. They won't feel the urgency.

There is this conflict where they see Bobby Kennedy at this point as someone who's telling them we need a cooling-off period. They think, no, just, just the opposite. We need to turn up the heat and really get this issue taken care of. By the end, of course, the Justice Department does send people down to help them out. In fact, one of Bobby Kennedy's aides is himself beaten with a lead pipe and thrown under a parked car during the Montgomery riot that I just described.

Eventually, under pressure, the Justice Department leans on the Interstate Commerce Commission, I think it is, to fundamentally revise its rules so that this Boynton decision that you mentioned will be upheld and that there can be no more segregation. In that sense, the freedom rides are very successful, and the Justice Department comes round to advocate their cause.

Alison Stewart: There's a whole bunch of detail in your book which I'll let people read about when they pick it up. I want to move on to 1963 and the march on Washington. By now, John Lewis is the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. What was the purpose of SNCC?

David Greenberg: SNCC was formed in 1960 as those sit-ins were really getting going. There was a recognition that we had all these different student groups in different parts of the South, and that it would be useful for them to have some kind of coordinating committee. It really started as just a simple vehicle for these different student leaders and ministers to be in touch with one another. Soon, like any organization, its leaders decide that they should set some bigger goals and ambitions of their own. Of course, some of the students soon graduate, so they're no longer students.

They're now young civil rights activists. SNCC really has a variety of causes. Some of it is to continue these campaigns of direct action desegregation in various cities and towns. They also take up what we might call community organizing, but really in rural areas in South Georgia, in Mississippi, getting local African Americans who, like the Lewis family, have been somewhat cowed into submission to recognize that they can try to take their fate into their own hands.

In other words, the activism doesn't have to be limited to the students, many of whom might be called middle class, but that these poor farmers, day laborers, domestics, women who work as domestics, they too can be part of this. SNCC is really trying to organize voter registration efforts and other efforts in a variety of cities and states around the South.

Alison Stewart: John Lewis is the chairman of SNCC. It's the march in Washington. He's going to give a speech, but it was a little bit controversial. What was the controversy about? To you, as someone who's researched it, what stood out to you about his speech?

David Greenberg: It's a wonderful story, and I can't do justice to the whole saga here. People will have to read it, as I hope they will. In a nutshell, the march on Washington was originally conceived by two great civil rights leaders, A. Philip Randolph, a longtime labor leader, and Bayard Rustin, who was his chief lieutenant. When they conceived the march, they were really thinking it should be for economic causes, for jobs, for economic opportunity. Once Martin Luther King comes aboard and they really put together a coalition of all the leading civil rights groups, including SNCC, it becomes for freedom too.

You think of the jobs as Philip Randolph and the freedom as Martin Luther King. The other thing that happens is between the time the march is first conceived and the time that John Lewis comes on board, the Kennedy administration introduces its civil rights bill that would go on to be the famous 1964 Civil Rights Act. Instead of being a march to prod the Kennedy administration to action, the Kennedys figured out they should get with the program. I wouldn't say they're trying to co opt the march, but they do turn it into a rally to get this bill passed.

SNCC, as the most radical or militant of the many partners in the march, they're not so excited about Kennedy's bill. They see a lot of ways in which it falls short. It's not great on voting. They're going to need another act later, the Voting Rights Act. It's not great on some issues of police brutality. Some of those issues don't get passed until the Clinton administration puts in important provisions against police brutality. There's a lot of things that are left out. Lewis's speech, which he drafts, first himself, but then with input from a lot of other people at SNCC, is a pretty stinging, critical speech about all the things left out of the bill and all the problems.

It's not a love letter to the Kennedys or the Democratic Party. When the advanced text of the speech makes its way into the hands of some of the partners, including, most important, the archbishops or the Catholic Church was participating in-- The archbishop of Washington was going to give the benediction. He finds objections, says he won't go on stage if this speech is to be given. People at the Justice Department are objecting. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP has objections. In this amazing scene, they're there at the Lincoln Memorial in the shadow of the colossal Lincoln statue, negotiating over language changes, making edits and revisions.

Poor young John Lewis, he's done a lot of public speaking in some sense in the movement, but he's never done a big speech before 250,000 people. He had practiced the old version, so he really knew it. Now it's getting revised on the spot. One source who was there and remembers it said, I just remember John Lewis saying to everyone, don't change too much, don't change too much. In the end, I think the compromise version of the speech he gave was a masterpiece of political compromise. He took out just enough to make Martin Luther King and A. Philip Randolph, and the others happy that it wouldn't be a sour note in what was shaping up otherwise as a beautiful, historic day of triumph.

He also did not water it down so much that his message was lost. Sure enough, a lot of the next-day stories wrote more about Lewis's speech than about Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech, because Lewis was the one who was still hitting these notes of how much more we still have to do. In a way, you see the early political skills of John Lewis navigating these different constituencies, finding a way to remain principled, even as he also knows how to be a team player.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a little bit of John Lewis at the march on Washington.

[audio playback begins]

John Lewis: We do not want to go to jail, but we will go to jail if this is the prize we must pay for love, brotherhood, and true peace. I appeal to all of you to get in this great revolution that is sweeping this nation. Get in and stay in the streets of every city, every village and hamlet of this nation until true freedom come, until the revolution of 1776 is complete. We must get in this revolution and complete the revolution. For in the delta of Mississippi, in southwest Georgia, in the black belts of Alabama, in Harlem, in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and all over this nation, the Black mass is on the march for jobs and freedom.

[applause] [cheering]

[audio playback ends]

Alison Stewart: That speech comes courtesy of the WNYC archives. After the break, we'll hear the story of the Selma march. This is All of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. You are listening to Full Bio. Our guest is David Greenberg, who wrote John Lewis: A Life. The 500-page book goes into so much detail that it would be impossible to share it all with you, so we're going by chronology and picked out a few important stories. No story of John Lewis can be told without the Selma march to Montgomery in 1965, referred to as Bloody Sunday. Behind the scenes, there was tension between the young leaders of the civil rights movement, James Forman, James Farmer, and specifically Stokely Carmichael, who wanted less civil and more rights. Here's David Greenberg, author of John Lewis: A Life.

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Alison Stewart: I wanted to get into a bigger picture issue with John Lewis, that he really believed there was a southern Black person experience and a northern Black person experience, and that they really shouldn't be considered the same thing. Can you explain the southern Black person experience and the northern Black person experience as John Lewis might have described it?

David Greenberg: I think there were a lot of differences as he understood it. He was drawn to both in Nashville, but then throughout his years in the South, a vision that started with the church, started with people like Martin Luther King, was initially focused on segregation, because the segregation in the South, it was not just a matter of separate water fountains and not being able to use the library. That was bad enough, but was really an order where whites were on top, Blacks were on the bottom, and this kind of strict separation was ruthlessly and often violently maintained.

He went to Buffalo as a young boy with an uncle who drove him up there for the summer. They had cousins, uncle, and aunt there. Lewis saw in Buffalo a completely different world. It's not to say the north was free by any stretch of racism or discrimination, but whites and Blacks lived next door to each other. They rode the bus together. They often interacted with perfect civility and decency. He just saw it was a different way of living. There were many northerners who would come down and get involved in the civil rights movement. They tended to have different priorities, just a different way of looking at the world.

They were not always as churchy, as they like to say. Often came from a more secular, you might say Marxist or just left wing radical tradition that was all an analysis of power. We have this today in the academy. Sometimes it can be quite oversimplified that everything's just about power. I think Lewis saw that, thought some of the northerners didn't fully get the experience of growing up in the South, of living in the South under this oppressive regime. There were tensions really from the beginning within SNCC and in other parts of the movement in those early years, say from '60 to '65 or so.

Both Lewis and a man named James Forman, who's the executive director of SNCC, I think do a remarkable job of containing those tensions, channeling them fruitfully, making sure they don't disrupt the mission of the group. After the passage of the '64 Civil Rights Act and then the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, there's a question of, what should our next big goals be?

At that point, some of these differences between the northerners and the southerners really start to divide the movement to the point where within a few years, a couple of years, SNCC is a shadow of its former self. John Lewis, Robert Moses, Julian Bond, many of its great leaders leave the organization, and it goes in a radically different direction. It's a serious rift, and it's one that I think most people in the movement saw and experienced to some degree or other, although they would to this day probably debate and argue about its particular significance and the merits of one position versus another.

Alison Stewart: March 7th through the 25th, 1965, was the Selma march. What was the purpose of the Selma march?

David Greenberg: In Selma, this was after the passage of the '64 Civil Rights Act which, as I mentioned, did not do as much as many people had hoped to make voting and voting rights a reality for Blacks in the South. As I think listeners probably know, even though the constitution guaranteed the vote, was supposed to guarantee the vote for people regardless of race, that was not the reality in the South where all kinds of methods, poll taxes, literacy tests, and often just raw assertion of power prevented Blacks not only from voting, but even from registering in the first place.

The people of Selma had been organizing for some time. SNCC had been there as early as 1963. In late 1964, feeling frustrated with the lack of progress, they asked Martin Luther King and his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to come in to help out, and that maybe King, with all of his media attention, he had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, this could draw attention to Selma and this drive for voting rights. Some of these splits that we've been talking about now start to rear their head.

In particular, splits between SNCC and SCLC, King's group. Initially, SNCC was almost like a youth auxiliary to King's group. Its first offices were in a corner of SCLC's offices. King was there at the founding meeting. Again, it's sometimes a north/south distinction. Some of the SNCC members begin to develop a certain amount of scorn, you might even say, for Martin Luther King.

Alison Stewart: Generational differences even.

David Greenberg: generational differences. One woman I talked to just a couple of years ago while interviewing for this book, it was if it was yesterday, she said, I could not believe King was such a conniver and a manipulator. I've never heard anyone talk about Martin Luther King that way. This is someone, you might say, from the left who felt he was not strong enough on civil rights issues. These conflicts emerge. At one point, some of John Lewis's old friends from Nashville, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, Diane Nash, they're all working for King now, interestingly, and they decide we need to have a march, a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery.

50-something miles, I think. It was the kind of classic tactic that could galvanize attention. Lewis compared it to Gandhi's famous march to the sea. The problem is SNCC really doesn't want to participate because they're feuding with King and SCLC and they think this is one of his vanity projects. Lewis, who had met King at a young age and always remained loyal to him, would never say a bad word about King. Lewis wants to march. He convinces SNCC to say, whoever in SNCC wants to march as an individual can march, I won't be representing the group.

He and a number of others decide to participate. On March 7th, the day of the planned march, he's at the forefront of the line along with Hosea Williams, who's representing SCLC. They begin to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which is what leads out of town and will take them on the road to Montgomery. There they're confronted by a sea of the local sheriff and his posse, and also state troopers of George Wallace's Alabama National Guard.

Alison Stewart: We've seen the footage of this, this terrible beating that John Lewis takes. Initially, how far did they think the protests were going to get? Did they really believe they were going to be able to continue on?

David Greenberg: Some people that day brought backpacks and toothbrushes. Others came for a day-long march. People were dressed and ready for different expectations. Certainly the hope was that they were going to march on to Montgomery. That plan is cruelly and brutally interrupted by this police violence that sends John Lewis and other people like Amelia Boynton and others to the hospital. I should say a photo researcher I worked with found this rare footage, I don't know anyone who'd seen it before, of Lewis in his hospital bed that afternoon talking to reporters. What's he talking about? Nonviolence. It's the most amazing thing.

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John Lewis: I will never forget that day as we crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge, crossing the Alabama river and seeing the sea of blue below, the hundreds of state police officers, the state troopers, Sheriff Clark, Jim Clark, the sheriff of Selma, and members of his posse with billet clubs and bullwhips, and chasing us with horses, and tramping us, and releasing the tear gas. I almost died. I think on that Sunday afternoon, I saw death when I was being beaten.

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David Greenberg: This, of course, has the effect of once again outraging the nation. Footage of the beating is shown on television that night. Photographs run on the front pages everywhere the next day. Lyndon Johnson is moved to action to finally introduce that voting rights bill, which he wanted to introduce. There's a film about Selma that got that wrong, a Hollywood feature film several years ago. Johnson favored the voting rights bill. He just wasn't ready to introduce it yet because it was so soon after the '64 bill. Now he realized he had to move, the time had come. In that sense, John Lewis's beating and heroism led fairly directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which remains a critical pillar in ensuring the vote today.

Alison Stewart: What is something, David, that you learned about the march in Selma that surprised you or you hadn't seen raised before?

David Greenberg: One thing that was surprising was just to see how political it became. The kind of school book, storybook version we often get of some of these dramatic moments focuses on the heroism, the triumph, which of course should be spotlighted, but we then lose sight of some of the aspects that reveal the leaders to be human beings with rival agendas, sometimes competing egos, conflicts. To see just how much bad blood there was between SNCC and King, for example, was eye-opening to me. Then also, I think to see how much it left SNCC without a clear sense of what to do next.

This really gets to the post-Selma question. Even that spring, they're trying to figure out, where do we go from here? John Lewis actually writes an op ed piece for a paper called the New York Herald Tribune, used to be one of the great American newspapers. He's trying to think through an outline, where does the movement go? One of the ideas he takes up, it's much like an idea that his mentor Bayard Rustin articulated, was going into politics and African Americans grabbing the levers of power from a political office, whether it's mayor or city council, or Congress, to try to make change from the inside as well as from the outside.

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Alison Stewart: 1968 was a hard year for John Lewis. MLK was assassinated, so was Bobby Kennedy. Lewis had worked for both men. This was a hard time for him. What did he need to figure out?

David Greenberg: John Lewis had a lot to figure out in 1968. He had left SNCC in 1966 under very unhappy circumstances. One night he had been reelected as chairman only in the middle of the night for people to object to his his reelection and conspire to hold a new election in which he was deposed. That obviously left a bad taste in his mouth. He left SNCC a short while later. He then spends a year in New York, which I write about fascinating little-known chapter of his life. He's living in Chelsea and commuting to Fifth Avenue where he's working at a foundation and a fish out of water in a suit behind the desk. In '68, he finds some hope in Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.

He's known Kennedy since those Freedom Rides days, but has developed a much more positive relationship with him and has come to see Kennedy as someone who learns who has been won over to the cause, who has grown as a man and as a politician. He's with Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis on April 4, the night that Martin Luther King is shot. Utterly devastating to Lewis. Then he's with Kennedy two months later, or he's just upstairs in the Ambassador Hotel when Kennedy himself is murdered.

These events kind of together really leave John Lewis at his wit's end, at a loss. He's always someone who's run himself hard. There are memos I found from his SNCC days, where staffers would say, "We need to give John Robert Lewis a rest and let him take a break because he's exhausted." He's actually hospitalized for exhaustion or maybe it's depression in the summer of '68. He's just started dating a woman named Lillian Miles. John Lewis never really dated much all those years. He's 28 by now. There's really no indication of anybody serious in his life before Lillian.

She's there each day coming to the hospital, bringing him his mail, bringing him his newspaper. He remains an avid reader and very unromantically, he proposes to her from the hospital bed. One of John Lewis' good friends, a Georgia congressman named Buddy Darden, said to me, "You cannot understand the second half of John Lewis's great career without understanding Lillian, because she helps him find that second act of where he goes into politics.

Alison Stewart: This is so funny that you bring this up because I looked up her obituary and she's described as wife, friend, and political advisor to John Lewis. She had ambitions for him.

David Greenberg: Right. It really understates the-- that's accurate, but it understates her importance to him. She definitely had ambitions for him. Whenever an office opened up that he might run for, she encouraged him to run. In 1986, when the congressional seat from Atlanta opens up and John's best friend, Julian Bond is going to run, she encourages John to run anyway, that he doesn't have to stand back and always be the one to defer and let Julian have the seat, that he too should make a go for it because he would be a better representative.

Once he's in Congress, she encourages him to run for leadership roles, even to become speaker. Her ambitions for him are limitless and she just thinks the world of him. John Lewis is not without ambition himself. He's an interesting mix of qualities. In some ways just the most humble, self-effacing person you'll ever meet but like all politicians, he's not without ambition. I wouldn't say she implants the ambition, I think she kind of nurtures it and encourages and gives him the self-confidence to realize, "I may be this farm boy from Alabama with a thick rural accent who people don't always completely understand when he speaks, but I can still be a congressman. I could still do these great things."

I think her encouragement and partnership is really central to understanding his career. I think she really hasn't been written about. She stayed out of the limelight. I think my book will, I hope, give readers a fuller sense of her and her importance.

Alison Stewart: From your book, what would you say was the pro of Lillian being involved in John Lewis's career? Then maybe what was the con of Lillian being in John Lewis's career?

David Greenberg: Certainly the pro was she not only gave him self-confidence and ambition, but she complimented him in many ways. He wasn't a great administrator or the most organized person. She'd say in his campaigns-- he first runs for Congress in 1977, and she was at home. They had adopted a boy, so John Miles, their son was very young. She'd be at home but directing everything. She'd put together the day schedules. She'd be calling up his press secretary, his campaign manager, saying, "You got to pick him up here and take him there next." John Lewis, at this point, actually still didn't drive, have another endearing quality about him.

She's organized, she's disciplined, she's good with a lot of the things that he is not good at, and she's also tough. John Lewis, he never liked to fire anyone. He never liked to break bad news. She would be the one to do it. One of his chiefs of staff told me a story about someone in the Atlanta office who Lillian had wanted fired. The chief of staff called down to Atlanta a couple weeks later, and this woman answered the phone and he thought, "Oh, that's interesting. She's back in the office just voluntarily answering the phones."

It turns out John Lewis had felt bad, so he'd hired her back. There were these differences, and sometimes it could be a problem. There are people in the office who talked about living in some fear of answering the phone in case it was Lillian calling. She could be tough. There was friction with a lot of people, with some of his chiefs of staff. In the end, they would find a way to make it work. A lot of people who are very ambitious and successful have that quality about them. They're demanding, they're tough, and especially if the partner is someone like John Lewis, who's just gracious and tolerant and likes to say yes to everything, you need someone who's going to be the bad cop.

Alison Stewart: My guest is David Greenberg. We're talking about John Lewis: A Life. It's our choice for full bio. John Lewis got into politics. He loses his first race for Congress. What did he learn from that situation?

David Greenberg: It's an interesting race because Lewis loses to A white politician, a liberal white, named Wyche Fowler, who then goes on to be senator later. I think he discovers that he likes politics. That's the main thing, that it was a bit of a risk for him. There were other people like Andrew Young, like Julian Bond, who were more natural politicians, gregarious, easy to rattle off policy positions. It didn't come as naturally to John. I think he found in '77, he was pretty good at it. He had come in a creditable second place. He then, in 1981, runs for the city council and actually wins quite handily, and then goes out to serve a full term and a tiny bit more in the Atlanta City Council.

There, I think he learned something very different. On city council, this is his first time holding elective office. John Lewis is a very principled man, and there's a lot of corruption on the city council. Some of the members have deals on the side, and they're passing laws that favor a law firm or a business that they have an interest in. He's a bear on ethics legislation. He also tries to stop a parkway that Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young, who's now the mayor, want to build to go to the new Jimmy Carter presidential library but is going to cut through historic neighborhoods and really eat up some beautiful tracts of land.

In a very principled way, Lewis holds out on this fight. We can admire the principle. But one thing he found was he couldn't get much else done. The city council chairman denied him any key appointments. A lot of people found him too difficult to work with. He learns that principle has to be melded with a certain kind of pragmatism. Not that you sell out or you compromise your principles, but that you do sometimes have to accept the law that's imperfect because it's the way to make partial progress, or it's the way to get other people to support something that you want that's even more important.

That kind of deal-making and other aspects of politics that some people find unseemly, he realizes, is part of getting things done.

Alison Stewart: In 1985, he ran for Georgia's fifth congressional district, and it cost him a friend. It was Julian Bond and John Lewis. They had a little bit of a tumultuous relationship. First of all, what was Bond's pitch and what was Lewis's pitch?

David Greenberg: it's amazing that these two dear friends ran against each other. It's almost hard to believe. When John Lewis first moves to Atlanta in 1963 as chairman of SNCC, this is the big city for him, bigger city than Nashville even. It's Julian Bond who comes from a well-to-do family. His father was a famous educator. He had met people like Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein in his youth. It's Julian who teaches John Lewis things like how do you order in a fancy restaurant. What's a mixed drink I can order? Things like that. Their families became close. They would take vacations, do birthdays together.

For them to run against each other was quite a thing. Julian is dashingly handsome, incredibly articulate, silver-tongued, witty, can have a command of policy, and he's kind of the celebrity candidate. We think of John Lewis today as having this iconic status. But in 1985, 1986, Julian was far more famous. He was hosting SNL, he was in movies with Sidney Poitier. It was a different level of fame. John Lewis, people of course, knew his civil rights activities, but he was this rumpled, squat roly-poly guy with a thick accent again.

Some people felt, is that who we really want representing us? It was clear now that after Wyche Fowler's term, the seat was going to again go to a Black representative. A lot of people took the view that Julian Bond should be the face of Black Atlanta if you will, that a more handsome face, a more polished presentation. Over the course of the campaign, a few things happen. One, John Lewis just works harder. Julian Bond, in a previous campaign, had left a voicemail message, or actually in those days, answering machine tape message saying, "Don't leave a message here. I get too many calls." It was a kind of dismissive thing that an elected politician should never be saying on his message.

It left the impression that he wasn't really that interested in serving the public. John Lewis would be out there at sunrise at the factory gates, and he would be there after sunset, in the aisles of the 7/11 or the 24-hour convenience store, just shaking hands with whoever's still around. Then there was also the issue of drug use. This was the summer of 1986 when the election really heats up. It's the summer of just say no. Drugs are listed as number one concern of Atlantans and other Americans in all kinds of surveys. It's an open secret in at least parts of elite Atlanta that Julian Bond has a pretty serious cocaine problem.

The FBI investigates, the police. That's not widely known, but it's known to a number of people and it's known to John Lewis.

Alison Stewart: John Lewis uses it.

David Greenberg: Yes, he decides to use it. When it's a multi-candidate race, it's actually a different candidate, a woman named Mildred Glover, who first puts it on the table saying, "All of us should take a drug test," but when it gets down to the two person runoff and John Lewis is trailing Julian by a lot, in the first vote, Bond I think gets 47% and Lewis something like 34%, and so the top two finishers go to a runoff. Bond challenges Lewis to debates and he thinks he's going to wipe the floor with Lewis because it's a forum, a medium that he's just so much better suited to, but Lewis ends up coming off as pretty authentic and direct and he holds his own.

Bond seems to strike some people at least as entitled to the seat, but then also Lewis picks up the drug challenge and at first he's reluctant to do so, but his campaign manager, he said, "We were like Angelo Dundee and Cus D'Amato in the corners, like the old boxing managers saying, 'Do it, do it.'" The first debate comes and goes. Lewis doesn't raise it, but in the second debate he raises it and says, "We should both take a drug test." Bond gets quite indignant, then makes a gaffe in which he says, "There's no drug problem in Atlanta," which seems like he's out of touch.

It ends up-- I don't know whether that one issue swung the election. I think it was a combination of things. The authenticity, the hard work. Lewis puts together a coalition of working-class Blacks who break his way and white voters who break his way. Bond tends to get the more upper and upper-middle-class Black voters. It's an interesting breakdown of how the vote goes. On election night, what had been 47 to 34, Lewis ends up winning something like 52 to 48, so it's this amazing come-from-behind story. There's a very moving account in the book. I won't go into it all right here, but how his campaign manager shares the news on that election night, the surprise win in a race I think they all expected to lose.

Alison Stewart: It appeared that Lewis, he had kind words later on for Bond in their older age, but Bond didn't. He definitely held a grudge. Why do you see the discrepancy?

David Greenberg: Look, it's a lot easier to be forgiving when you Win, and so I think that was part of it. Look, John Lewis was also just someone who did have these deep reserves of forgiveness and did wish to patch things up with Bond. I think Bond understandably felt that his friend had gone negative on him in a way that was personal. At one point, Bond says to his son, "Look, I also know things about John Lewis that could ruin his career, but I'm not going to say them."

Bond, I think, felt that he was polite and respected the friendship and was really quite surprised that John Lewis hadn't. Some people say, Oh, it was Lillian, or "It was the campaign managers," but look, ultimately, John Lewis knew what he was doing, and he's responsible for his decision. He did express regret about it, but it's also the case that you could argue voters have a right to know if their elected representative has a serious drug problem, which at the time, Bond most definitely did. He cleaned up. He went on to have a very distinguished later career himself as a professor at the NAACP, but at that time, it was a serious problem.

It's hard to argue with John Lewis being elected, given that he then served these 34 illustrious years in Congress.

Alison Stewart: So he was reelected 16 times, is that correct, for that office?

David Greenberg: I think that that's right. 1986 through 2020. Didn't make it to election day in 2020.

Alison Stewart: What would you describe as his first big test in Congress?

David Greenberg: Part of it was just the challenge that all freshmen or new members of Congress face about how you have an impact. Very wisely, he decided to tend the home district, bring home the bacon. He got onto a committee, something like Transportation and Interior Affairs. That might have been the other committee, seemingly a backwater, but from transportation, he delivered money for Atlanta's airport, which, of course, was emerging as a major hub for air travel, also for its MARTA public transportation system.

That kept him in good standing back home. He also began to use his power to preserve and promote the memory and legacy of the civil rights movement itself. He's on a national parks subcommittee and passes legislation to make the Selma to Montgomery trail a national park. I don't know that anyone had ever made a highway a national park before, but it was a way of giving it an official federal status and federal funds. Now if you drive that highway, you're very much made aware of the history that took place there.

He starts doing a lot of things like that. The challenge is then, as a junior member, how do you have influence? The next step is he's really tapped by Tom Foley, the Democratic speaker, to become part of the party leadership because Foley realizes that the moral authority that John Lewis already commands will be very useful to him if, say, he's going to the White House to argue with George Bush Sr. Over a civil rights bill. People forget this. George Bush Sr. Was the first president to veto a civil rights bill since Andrew Johnson. He has gotten this warm and fuzzy makeover, but he was not a friend of civil rights.

Lewis comes with Foley. He's made one of the deputy chief whip. Several people hold this title, but he's an important one. He tells President Bush, "You can't keep demagoguing this bill and calling it a quota bill. You're fanning the flames of division." Bush, who had vetoed the bill one time, the second time around, capitulates and signs it. It's not only John Lewis who achieves that but partly his strong words and moral example help bring the pressure that bring Bush and other Republicans around to support a civil rights bill in 1991.

Alison Stewart: As you said, he was the moral center for many people in Congress. One of his last acts was a sit-in at the Capitol. He staged a sit-in to force action on a gun control bill. It was shortly after the Pulse nightclub shooting which killed 49 people. First of all, how old was he when they did that?

David Greenberg: He would have been already 78 years old. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who was one of the Democrats sort of organizing it, they were very frustrated at the Republicans; refusal to pass even what the Democrats like to call common sense gun legislation. The Pulse nightclub shooter, people may remember, was a sworn adherent of ISIS, the Islamic State. The Democrats said, "How about we just pass a bill? If you're on a terrorist watch list, you can't buy a gun." Seems pretty straightforward. It should appeal to national security types like the Republicans style themselves, but no dice.

They're brainstorming what to do, and Cicilline says, maybe we should just each go up to the well of the Congress and make a speech, but not leave, just stay there. Then Lewis says, "Then we should sit down," and Cicilline says, to me, "It just all clicked." In that one comment, he fuses this issue of gun violence and our plans to the whole history of the sit-in movement and the civil rights movement. It was a masterstroke, and people may well remember for the next few days, Congress and the political coverage is consumed with covering this sit-in on the House floor.

It goes against House rules, but that's civil disobedience for you. C-SPAN was told to shut off the cameras, but people start live streaming it from their phones. You could say, "It didn't actually produce the legislation they wanted," but it did return attention to this very devastating issue of gun violence that we continue to grapple with. Lewis, he's brought protest into politics. We've seen him bring politics into protest. What's really amazing about his life is he was a master of both. He knew when it was right to shake the system from the outside and when it made sense to work the levers from the inside.

Alison Stewart: July 17th, 2020, we lose John Lewis. He succumbs to pancreatic cancer. He had a famous line, "Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America." What do you want people to remember about John Lewis?

David Greenberg: I think people will take many things from his life, and most of all from this book, I hope that I've done justice to his rich and complicated life. I think for some people, it is this incredible devotion to Gandhian nonviolence and the social gospel idea of what he called the beloved community. An ideal society, which we're not about to achieve tomorrow, but we should keep fighting for, in which our differences are resolved without violence, in which we're all treated with equal dignity and respect and equality under the law.

I think for others, it may be about how important interracial cooperation was to his political worldview. From those earliest days in Nashville through to the end, he fought always to work with white colleagues, white allies. He was a strong supporter in Atlanta and also in the Congress of the Black Jewish Alliance. I think for other people, it may simply be his inveterate hope. There's a lot in the book about John Lewis's role after Donald Trump is elected in 2016. A lot of people were quite distraught. They had not expected Trump to win then.

One woman described feeling just distraught and despairing and seeing John Lewis getting a shoeshine in the Atlanta airport and then going up to him and getting a hug and feeling that everything was going to be okay. He had that effect on people. I think we're in times of struggle and uncertainty now, and John Lewis, I think, still can provide for a lot of people that sense of hope. That even though we see the flaws in our democracy, there are traditions and ideals and people we can hold on to who can carry us forward to continue to improve the country and make it a better version of itself.

Alison Stewart: The book is called John Lewis A Life. It is by David Greenberg. It was our choice for full bio. David, thank you so much for giving us so much time.

David Greenberg: Thank you, Allison. This has been terrific. I've really enjoyed it.