A masterful biography is like a shooting star. It’s a celestial phenomenon that lights up the night sky and bestows a sense of wonder and excitement. Such a sensation occurs when the stars align and match a subject of worth with an estimable writer. That kind of luminous pairing occurs in David Greenberg’s “John Lewis: A Life,” the first major biography of the man Martin Luther King Jr. called “the boy from Troy.”
Growing up in Alabama’s abysmal poverty, the third of 10 children, John Robert Lewis (1940-2020) aspired to be a preacher — a challenge for a child with a heavy rural accent and a speech impediment. At the age of 5, he practiced preaching to the chickens on his family’s farm in Pike County, on the outskirts of Troy. His elementary-school education was at Dunn’s Chapel, funded by Sears, Roebuck heir Julius Rosenwald, who, with Booker T. Washington, built 5,000 schools for Black children around the South. After the Bible, Washington’s “Up from Slavery” became young John’s favorite book.
Born into segregation, Lewis sat in the “colored only” balcony to watch movies, and he drank Cokes standing outside the drugstore while his white peers sat at the counter. He finally stopped going to the Pike County Fair because he could only go on “Colored Day.”
Lewis became the first in his family to attend college. After being rejected by Troy University in 1957 due to segregation, he enrolled at American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, supposedly the most liberal city in the Confederacy. He later transferred to nearby Fisk University, where he earned his degree.
As a college sophomore, Lewis became transfixed by the preaching of nonviolence by King, Mahatma Gandhi and members of the Social Gospel movement. Unshakeable in his faith that “God would never allow his children to be punished for doing the right thing,” the young man consecrated himself to the civil rights movement and began organizing sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, stand-ins at segregated department stores and swim-ins at segregated pools.
The youngest speaker at 1963’s March on Washington, Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders to integrate seating on public buses; he was frequently bloodied and beaten unconscious. He was arrested and jailed dozens of times for demonstrating throughout the South, and once spent 40 days in the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Yet he never struck back, adhering always to Gandhi’s nonviolence creed. “We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal,” said the young man once so terrified of thunder and lightning that he’d hide in the family’s steamer trunk whenever it stormed.
Greenberg, a prize-winning professor of U.S. history and journalism at Rutgers University, divides his spectacular biography of the civil rights icon into two parts: Protest (1940-1968) and Politics (1969-2020). One of his most arresting chapters, “John vs. Julian,” mimics Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare: Lewis, the slow-moving tortoise, went up against Julian Bond, the fast-paced hare, in a 1986 campaign to be the Democratic candidate for Georgia’s 5th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The campaign defined their professional futures while destroying their once-close friendship.
The contrast was stark: Lewis in shiny, rumpled suits and worn-out shoes, alongside Bond in custom-made blazers and tasseled loafers. Smooth, suave and light-skinned, Bond, an “incorrigible ladies’ man,” was hiding a heavy cocaine habit, which Lewis exposed during a debate by challenging him to take a drug test. Bond refused.
Lewis pushed. “Can you tell us why you will not take the test,” he said, “so that people will know that you are not on drugs?” Bond responded that he was not on drugs, and the moderator asked Lewis if he was accusing his opponent of illegal drug use.
“No,” said Lewis, a bit disingenuously. “I do not suspect that he is on drugs, I just feel like he should take the test to clear his name and remove public doubt. People need to know.” Bond was incensed. “Why did I have to wait twenty-five years to find out what you really thought of me?”
Lewis replied, “Julian, my friend, this campaign is not a referendum on friendship. This is not a referendum on the past. This is a referendum on the future of our city, the future of our country.”
Supported by the white vote in Atlanta, Lewis won the runoff, 52-48, and later the election. “We will shake hands,” he told the press. “The wounds will heal.” The wounds remained. Bond died in 2015 at age 75; Lewis was not invited to the funeral.
The most compelling aspect of this work is its in-depth research, including 250 interviews, which allowed Greenberg to paint a vivid portrait of the man heralded as “the conscience of Congress.” The professor’s academic credentials (summa cum laude at Yale; Ph.D. from Columbia), combined with his journalistic talent (bylines in Politico, the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times), have brought forth this captivating biography of a hero who cried easily, laughed often and never lost faith in “the beloved community,” where all God’s children, particularly those who got into “good trouble,” would be blessed.
