John Lewis was enrolled in a seminary in the Jim Crow city of Nashville when he embraced the belief that allowing himself to be beaten nearly to death in public would hasten the collapse of Southern apartheid.
In 1960, Lewis and his contemporaries carried that spirit into the sit-in campaign that forced Nashville to integrate its “white only” lunch counters. The following year, young protesters experienced homicidal levels of brutality when they boarded southbound Freedom Ride buses to challenge segregation in interstate transportation. When Lewis’s bus reached Montgomery, Ala., passengers were savaged by a white mob whose members carried every conceivable weapon — including bricks, chains, tire irons and baseball bats. Outside Anniston, Ala., Klansmen firebombed another bus and held its exit doors shut with the aim of burning the passengers alive.
The battering Lewis received four years later during the “Bloody Sunday” voting rights march in Selma, Ala., stands out for what happened next. Congress responded to the barbaric spectacle of state troopers bludgeoning demonstrators by finally outlawing the methods that the South had long used to prevent millions of Black people from registering to vote. Lewis was recovering from a fractured skull when Lyndon Johnson summoned him to Washington for the signing of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights movement’s holy grail. L.B.J. admonished Lewis to get the white South “by the balls” — by registering legions of Black people to vote — and to “squeeze, squeeze ’em till they hurt.”
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