“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America,” Senator John Lewis famously said. As a child, Lewis preached to the chickens at his family’s ramshackle home in Troy, Alabama, deep in the heart of the South. When he died in 2020 at the age of 80, he was known as “the Conscience of Congress.”
In the intervening years, he relentlessly called for an equitable and more just America rooted in Christian principles of nonviolence. Perhaps no other figure with the exception of Martin Luther King Jr. had more of an impact on the civil rights movement than Lewis, whom King called “the boy from Troy.” He was arrested over 40 times for committing acts of nonviolence against a repressive and systemic Jim Crow South.
He was beaten on multiple occasions, sustaining a fractured skull on March 7, 1965, at the hands of state troopers. That day would forever be known as Bloody Sunday, as hundreds of nonviolent protestors, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol were brutally manhandled by dozens of Alabama state troopers and a posse of White supremacists.
Yet Lewis was a stalwart, spending a lifetime demanding that America live up to its aspirational goals.
David Greenberg has written a splendidly beautiful biography that fully captures the heart and soul of this relentless warrior for justice. Framing Lewis’ life around his moral principles, Greenberg delivers a read that is moving and compelling. The author traces Lewis from his years as a student learning to be a preacher through his initial foray into nonviolence.
The subtext of Greenberg’s book is the notion that Lewis, even in his darkest hours, never gave up on building a democratic, multiracial society called “the beloved community.” Readers are swept up into the story as the author brings to life some of humanity’s worst traits, fended off by the better angels of our nature. Readers are in jail with Lewis, on the Freedom Rides with him, and barnstorming the country at fundraisers.
Relationships were critical to Lewis, whether it was with individuals in the press pool covering the movement or with the residents of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District representing both White and Black residents of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1986. The election for this congressional seat pitted him in the Democratic primary against one of his best friends, Julian Bond. Lewis won the primary and the seat in Congress, but for all intents and purposes lost a good friend in the political melee.
Every page of Greenberg’s biography reveals something new about this decent human being who was completely without guile. It brings us up to the age of Trump and MAGA, which Lewis felt not only undermined America’s civic fabric but was also a blow to what he had committed his life.
Lewis’ life represents the best of what humanity has to offer in difficult times. It’s not so much a tale of caution as it is a story of unrelenting and dynamic love rooted not in pettiness or ego, but rather in true reconciliation and restorative justice. For all his efforts and the efforts of people who walked, spent time in a jail cell, or marched with him, the United States has come far, but there’s still a need for what Lewis called “good trouble.” —James Percoco
