Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) speaks with reporters in Washington on March 5, 1999. (Khue Bui/AP)
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Columnist, The Washington Post
John Lewis was militant and gentle, a fighter and a peacemaker, brave and self-effacing, confident and humble. He was a listener whom others wanted to hear. He was a man of infinite faith and hope who nonetheless saw and experienced the profound shortcomings, even evils, of our world and our country. He was a partisan when he needed to be, but a unifier at all times.
In thinking about Lewis’s achievement, I found that the words coming to mind were not those of a politician or an organizer, but a well-known injunction from a pope. “If you want peace,” Paul VI said in 1972, “work for justice.” This was the commitment that drove Lewis’s life.
At a celebration of Lewis’s 65th birthday in 2005, a recently elected U.S. senator summed up the lesson taught by the man who had been beaten very nearly to death on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Ala., 40 years earlier.
“That in the face of the fiercest resistance and the most crushing oppression,” Barack Obama said, “one voice can be willing to stand up and say that’s wrong and this is right and here’s why. And say it again. And say it louder. And keep saying it until other voices join the chorus to sing the songs that set us free.”
We have heard many stirring tributes to Lewis since the Democratic congressman from Georgia’s death on Friday, among them my colleague Colbert King’s moving essay in The Post. We will continue to hear praise of his life for as long as the United States remains a freedom-loving nation.
Rather than trying to match the eloquence of what has already been said, I’d offer a tribute to this extraordinary public figure by remembering his own eloquence and wisdom.
As a nation, if we care for the Beloved Community, we must move our feet, our hands, our hearts, our resources to build and not tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to love and not to hate.