🩸🩸🩸 … on this day in 1965: NEVER FORGET
From my 4/15/22 posting “LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BLACK WOMEN”, about the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, but also about James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (celebrating the Appalachian poor) and about the late US Representative John Lewis, who on 3/7/65 led the first of three Civil Rights marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma AL — an event now known as Bloody Sunday, because of the savage attack on the marchers by state troopers and police:
[John Lewis:] A hero of mine, and of Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky)’s, and of my man Jacques Transue’s, from back in the disastrous days of the 1960s, when we got to regularly view scenes of literally murderous rage by white people directed at black people (every so often those hate-deranged whites actually did murder black folks, or lynch them; John Lewis escaped with his life, but just barely)
[In 1986, he was elected to Congress, in a district that included most of Atlanta GA, and served 17 terms. In summary:] Heroically dedicated to the cause of civil rights, physically heroic in that enterprise, and then an able and effective legislator, representing not just black Atlanta, but essentially all of it equally.
… he was an irrationally decent man (decent way beyond rational expectation), full of irrational hope (hopeful way beyond rational expectation) — buoyed by his faith, true, but there his decency and hope were, and some of it was quite astonishing, because it was in fact far from conventional Christianity … He truly believed that we could reach the Promised Land in this life (not in an afterlife on Jordan’s other bank) — just not in his life, it would take some time.
Conventional Christianity tells us that life on this earth is filled with pain, terror, mistreatment, outright slavery, and wickedness, but that the believer will be rewarded with undiluted and enduring joy and delight after death, with Jesus in the life everlasting. I’m sure John Lewis believed that too. But he also thought that with resolution and determination and good will you can change this world, make it truly better. You can remake this world in the spirit of Christ’s love. But the project will take some time and we have to stay the course.
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