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Episode 62: We Shall Not Be Moved · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: There is no question that Donald Trump,
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: a former president who is on the ballot next Tuesday,
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: November 5th,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: is not only a man in love with violence,
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: but also understands violence as a way to get what he wants.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: On May 1,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: 1989,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Trump took out a full-page ad in the New York Daily News demanding that New York
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: State execute five black teenagers who were,
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: as it turns out,
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: falsely accused of beating and raping a woman in Central Park.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: Trump has himself repeatedly been accused of sexually assaulting women.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Although she later retracted it,
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Trump's first wife,
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Ivana,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: accused him of raping her and pulling her hair out.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And on January 26, 2024, a civil jury convicted him of raping journalist E. Jean Carroll.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Trump has,
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: over time,
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: seen extremist militias as allies,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: and on January 6,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: 2021,
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: those militias attempted,
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: at his urging,
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: to overthrow a legally constituted election,
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: which he lost.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: He has incited violence against those he perceives as political enemies, particularly immigrants.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: He has promised,
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: if he is elected president again,
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: to violently deport 11 million undocumented people living and working peacefully in
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: the United States.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: He has promised to use the United States military against peaceful protesters.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: As Vice President Kamala Harris pointed out last week as she prepared to face
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: voters in a CNN town hall,
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Trump promises to rule violently,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: something his rally-goers and right-wing media supporters have cheered.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: In just the past week,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_03: Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within,
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_03: and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_03: And let's be clear about who he considers to be the enemy from within.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_03: Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify in his
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: mind as the enemy within,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_03: like judges,
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: like journalists,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: like nonpartisan election officials.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: Adolf Hitler,
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: and hundreds of thousands of Americans.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_03: All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_03: This is a window into who Donald Trump really is.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the use of violence against political enemies is unfortunately not
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: unprecedented in the United States.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Although it is illegal to deploy the military against American citizens,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: as Trump has promised to do,
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: police,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: hired security,
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: and Ku Klux Klan mobs have assaulted strikers,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: protesters,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: and civil rights activists since the 19th century.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: On May 4,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: 1970,
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Ohio National Guard troops murdered four peaceful anti-war protesters at Kent State University.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the most sustained use of political violence against American citizens has
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: been the deployment of police and deputized mobs against Black Americans.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: This violence intensified in the 1950s and 1960s as a Black-led interracial
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: coalition of students and activists across the Jim Crow South organized and
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: demonstrated nonviolently for the right to vote and to desegregate public accommodations,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: transportation,
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: and public schools.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: Politicians unhesitatingly deployed armed men against these brave souls and refused
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: to intervene when vigilantes beat,
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: murdered,
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: and raped activists.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: One of those activists was John Robert Lewis,
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: born in Pike County,
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Alabama in 1940,
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: and the first in his family to attend college.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: While attending a Nashville seminary,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis became involved in sit-ins organized to desegregate restaurants and other
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: public places,
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: and he quickly rose to a leadership position.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis eventually became the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: or SNCC,
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: an organization committed to nonviolent protest that organized the Freedom Rides in
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: 1961 and helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: At the march,
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: like many young people today who protest Israel's war on Gaza,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: expressed his disillusionment with politics and the failure of either party to
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: deliver racial justice.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: My friends, let us not forget that we are involved in a serious social revolution.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_02: By and large,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: American politics is dominated by politicians who build their career on immoral
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: compromises and allow themselves an open form of political,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: economic,
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_02: and social exploitation.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yet Lewis's social revolution bore fruit as politics,
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: and he himself,
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: like many movement activists,
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: eventually became a politician.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: After President John F.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963,
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: President Lyndon Johnson used his political capital to pass federal civil rights
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: bills in 1964 and 1965.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis took his activism into government itself and was elected to the United States
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: House of Representatives in 1986,
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: where he became part of the Democratic Party leadership.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: and served the people of the United States until his death in July 2020.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard not to think of Lewis,
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: his fight for justice and against violence,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: as voters in the United States face their most consequential election in 150 years.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think Lewis's spirit is watching over Vice President Kamala Harris in this last week of the campaign.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I invited David Greenberg,
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: the author of John Lewis,
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: A Life,
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: new from Simon & Schuster,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: to come and talk to us about a civil rights icon who helped to transform the
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: Democratic Party that Harris now leads.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Join David and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm your host,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Claire Potter,
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Professor of History Emeritus at the New School for Social Research,
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: a contributing editor at Public Seminar,
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is Episode 62, We Shall Not Be Moved.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: David Greenberg, welcome to the show.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Claire.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be on the show.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to begin by telling a little story,
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: which was a time that I was at Wesleyan University and I can't remember what I was doing.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was at walking the dog or something like that.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was a very new faculty member.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden I'm walking down the sidewalk and I run into John Lewis.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it was the strangest feeling because there I am in Middletown, Connecticut.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of started and I said,
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: Congressman Lewis.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: Hi, I'm Claire.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And he just stuck out his hand and said, and hi, I'm John.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And he was such a sweet man.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like you really capture that sweetness in the book.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us what drew you to the topic.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, it was in some ways I was casting about for next book subject.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I had written a
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: a book called Republic of Spin,
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: which was a history of the White House spin machine that I started my story more or
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: less with Teddy Roosevelt and went through Obama.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: But when the book came out, we were already into the Trump era.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was running for president and people were urging me,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: you got to write about Trump,
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: talk about Trump and spin and lying and sort of the new culture of truthful
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: hyperbole and alternative facts and all of that.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I sort of felt the last thing I wanted to do was write about Trump.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: After he won,
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: I was seeing Trump every day when I opened up my laptop,
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: when I turned on the TV,
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: and I was kind of casting for a historical project that would sort of take me away
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: from the chaos and the madness of the present.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I began to just notice John Lewis showing up a lot in the news, on TV.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was watching a documentary about the Bobby Kennedy campaign of 1968.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's John Lewis as a talking head.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: He had worked on that campaign, which I had not known or had not remembered.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: and I sort of had a eureka moment.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: There is no John Lewis biography, I discovered, and I thought I might as well be the one to write it.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: I have written a lot about politics and presidents and political parties and
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: political ideas,
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: but I had never done a book where race and America's racial struggle was at the
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: center of the narrative,
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: and I think you would agree,
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: most historians of the United States would agree that
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: that is a central, if not the central story of American history.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I felt this could be a way also to have something to say about that larger story.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like you really,
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: we think about those early years of the civil rights movement,
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: the 1950s,
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: as being very radical.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, John Lewis wasn't that radical a person.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if you could sort of start us with his boyhood and what leads him into
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: the movement and then leads him out and into politics.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: John Lewis,
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine like many people born into this deeply oppressive environment of Jim Crow,
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Alabama.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he suffered the depredations of both race and class.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he was born to sharecroppers who...
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: managed to scrape together enough money to buy land and a home of their own,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: but were still quite poor,
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: had to work the land,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: were often fighting off debt.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he knew he wanted a better life than that and would sort of argue with his
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: parents about the wisdom of farming and living the life they did.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: But he also, of course, felt the sting of racial discrimination and racial oppression.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And whether it was going into town to see a movie and the black kids had to sit up
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: in the balconies while the main seating area was reserved for whites or the time he
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: couldn't get a library card.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was an avid reader as a boy, which is something fascinating I discovered about him.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: but could not get a library card.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: He even organized his friends and brothers and sisters to petition,
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: sort of an early example of civil rights activism.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: So he felt very early,
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: just from his own experience,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: a desire to challenge and change the ways of the American South,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: the laws,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: the customs,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: the whole way of thinking and forcing people to live.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Not everyone did that.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: his parents,
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: obviously they were not happy with the Jim Crow order,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: but their way of getting along was to sort of keep their heads down,
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: do their work,
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: try to provide the best life they could for their family,
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: taking comfort in family and their church.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: But Lewis was listening to other people.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: He was reading the news regularly.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: He was inspired by Martin Luther King,
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: who he hears on the radio from Montgomery,
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Alabama,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: right around the time of the bus boycott of 1954,
• 12:40
  1955.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And this further confirms him in his desire to follow in King's footsteps and be a
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: leader in fighting for civil rights.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: He's also kind of a sweet person.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that sweetness really comes through in the book and imbues his work for the
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: movement with a kind of kindness that leads us to thinking about how nonviolence,
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: nonviolent direct action required a certain kind of person,
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: a certain kind of character.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: How is it that Lewis became so
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: committed to nonviolence.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think you're right in locating it in aspects of his personality.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he was an interesting combination of traits.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: He was deeply principled.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: He could be, especially as a young man, very stubborn.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: if he made up his mind that he wanted to march that day,
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: he was going to march,
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes against the advice or the preference of others.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed,
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: that was true on Bloody Sunday in 1965,
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: when SNCC,
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: votes not to participate in the march that's planned for voting rights on March 7th.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: But Lewis decides to do it as an individual, and that's when he's
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: famously beaten so badly in ways that end up moving the nation and the president to
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: move on voting rights.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: But you see that stubbornness and that principledness,
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: but you also see,
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: as you said,
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: a gentleness,
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: a sweetness,
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: a kindness.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that quality
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: is related to his natural propensity once he learns of the teachings of Gandhian nonviolence,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: of civil disobedience.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's something he takes to quite naturally.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: I had the privilege of interviewing James Lawson, who died last summer at 94.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And Lawson was a young divinity student in Nashville who really helped get this
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: group of Nashville students together in 1959,
• 14:50
  1960.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: stage the sit-ins and other protests.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And Lawson said to me, Lewis was ripe.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: When he came to Nashville,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: when he came to the workshops,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Lawson could see the qualities were already there that made him latch on to
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: nonviolence as not just a tact
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: as many civil rights activists thought, but as Lewis liked to say, a philosophy and a way of life.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's something I think he felt to the core of his being and something that he kept
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: with him his whole life.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something, and I think we should talk about this in a minute.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that actually eventually puts him at odds with other people in the movement.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I think one of the things this book shows very clearly is that although there
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: is something called the civil rights movement,
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: there are different movements within the civil rights movement.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And you really call our attention to,
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: to Nashville.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Normally we talk about Montgomery.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about Alabama or Mississippi,
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: but Nashville was actually an important cauldron for creating and developing these tactics.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk about what you learned about the movement by your focus on Lewis and Nashville?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, very much so.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you raised that, Claire.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: sometimes we look at the emergence of this next generation,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's generation of students who,
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: most visibly in 1960 emerged with the sit-ins and staged some remarkable successes
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: in desegregating various at least
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: some establishments in many southern cities and towns.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Nashville group of all of them is the biggest, the best organized, the most disciplined.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's also the one that's most steeped in Gandhian and also Christian social gospel teachings.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: the kind of fusion that I think certainly characterized Martin Luther King's philosophy,
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: but also characterized a lot of other ministers,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: including,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: as I said,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: James Lawson,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Kelly Miller Smith,
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: who led the First Baptist Church in Nashville,
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: other men and women,
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Metz Rollins,
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Andrew White.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of them whose names aren't nearly as well known as they should be.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Nashville,
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: it's interesting,
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: we sometimes think of SNCC and the student movement as being at odds with or in
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: conflict with King.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: But at the beginning,
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: the Nashville group is actually birthed under the aegis of something called the
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Nashville Christian Leadership Council.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's really a
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: a chapter of SCLC.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a much closer connection between King and his ideals and philosophy and
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: the sit-in movement than I think many historians or readers realize.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that's important about Nashville is at Fisk University,
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: which provides a lot of the students,
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: They had an exchange program where white students,
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: people from Indiana or California,
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: would come often for a semester to study.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: it took a certain kind of person who wants to be at a black college and is already
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: open-minded and progressive,
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: presumably.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And many of these people became very involved, both in 1960 and in later years.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the national movement was always racially integrated, and that was an important part of its identity.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: In some of these other cities,
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: they believed in integration,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: they believed in interracial cooperation,
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: but they were primarily black only.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: There weren't whites who were joining up with the cause.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that affected John Lewis in Nashville,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: that he he saw what an interracial community could be with whites and blacks being
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: treated not just as a legal principle,
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: but on a personal level with equal dignity and respect.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that, I think, was a profound experience for him.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And is that also what gets him committed so early to Israel?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he does in Nashville see a lot of Jewish community members who are providing support.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Not so many students per se, but the wider Nashville Jewish community.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: But even as a boy,
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis starts to develop this kind of affection and even sense of obligation toward
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: the Jewish people.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost funny to think of a guy who has so little power as a young black man, poor in the South.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: But having grown up in the Black Baptist tradition with the songs and prayers
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: evoking the Exodus story,
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: there was a real identification with the Jewish people that he felt as a young boy.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: He also told a story about going into Troy,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: the biggest city nearby,
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: the farm where he grew up,
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: and hearing people talk about a guy named Rosenberg,
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: a merchant,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: who was a Jew.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he said the way they said the word Jew was like the way people said the word.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he says the N word.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that taught him something.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it made him realize,
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: at least in certain parts of America and certain parts of the world,
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: the disdain and the position in which Jews were held.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And then throughout the movement, he's constantly finding people
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: It often is Jewish people who are the ones from the north or elsewhere who step up,
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: who are there at his side.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think he develops just a very deep affinity with the Jewish people and sees
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: These strong analogies in the Black and Jewish experiences, obviously there are major differences too.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that identity and that affinity is established,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: even as a boy,
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: but then even more so in those early years of the movement.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: He seems to have this sort of instinctual sense that there is something called a universal identity.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not that race doesn't matter to him,
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: but that race is something that you always have to be sort of putting to one side
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: when you're judging a person.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And that gets him into a lot of trouble when Stokely Carmichael begins to challenge him.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: And what are the kind of schisms that develop?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And how does Lewis actually cling to this idea of universalism?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: when the movement is splitting.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, SNCC, from the beginning, it's kind of a coalition.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: but even more so,
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: James Foreman,
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: who's the executive director,
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: is doing his best to kind of fashion it into a single organization.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: But as its name suggests,
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: it starts off as just a way of coordinating among these different sit-in groups
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: that are springing up across the South.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so from the beginning...
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not everybody's on the same page.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: they all share the basic goal of integration,
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: but there are some who are deeply Christian,
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: like John Lewis,
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: and others,
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: like Stokely Carmichael,
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: who come from a fundamentally,
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: secular,
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: left-wing radical,
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: you might even say Marxist tradition.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't a lot of Marxism explicit in SNCC, but, you know, a left-wing radical tradition.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: There are, you know, northerners and southerners.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are those who believe in nonviolence, as I said, as a true deep commitment.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And those who see it as a useful tactic that can maybe be discarded when the time comes.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think,
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: as you say,
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: there are those who share a fundamentally universalist ideal,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: which,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: again,
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think is informed in Lewis's case.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: both by his Christianity and his understanding of the teachings of Jesus,
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: but I think it's also informed by the kind of liberal milieu in which he first experiences.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, after all, integration is basically a call saying we want to be treated as equal.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think we historians need to do some work in kind of complicating a narrative that has emerged
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: about colorblindness,
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: whereas now we're very disdainful of it and we can see it as a kind of cover for
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: conservative indifference to continued racial progress.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at the early 1960s, that kind of language is all over the movement.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And people like King and others are talking in those terms,
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: not because they believe blackness has to be erased or downplayed,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: but because what they were striving for is treat me as an equal,
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: damn it.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis is not indifferent or unaware of the call of Black consciousness as that
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: develops in the early 60s.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: He makes many eloquent statements about it.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: He believes that the movement should always be Black-led and understands that there
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: are differences fundamentally in how a Black person will perceive the world and a
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: white person will.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_00: But he also believes ultimately in what he and King and Lawson,
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: they call the beloved community,
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: where ultimately those differences will be resolved and not a source of conflict or strife.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: So,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: yeah,
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: it's precisely in the mid 60s,
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: especially after the great achievements of the 64 Civil Rights Act,
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: the 65 Voting Rights Act.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: The whole movement is asking, what comes next?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Where do we go from here?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And America is radicalizing.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's urban unrest.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Blacks in the cities are protesting.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you know, great.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing away with segregation in the South,
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: but what about our abject economic lot here in the cities?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: The Vietnam War.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And in this context,
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis,
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: both his universalism and the nonviolence,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: as well as I think his growing interest in working with the system,
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: because he does see Lyndon Johnson as someone who delivered on these big pieces of legislation.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: He does always revere King and want to keep working with King.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So those two are sources of conflict within SNCC.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, famously in 1966,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: after first winning a campaign or a night of re-election,
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: a vote for re-election,
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: he's very dubiously ousted in a late night second vote that is not really a
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: legitimate vote that leads to his leaving SNCC.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say leaving the movement in the larger sense,
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: but certainly leaving the civil rights movement in the narrower understanding of
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: that term.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a moment at which the civil rights movement is actually becoming something else.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Martin Luther King is actually becoming a more radical person.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's,
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: addressing the war, he's addressing poverty.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pause just for a second to talk about John Lewis's relationship with King,
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: because on the one hand,
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis seems to have revered him.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: And on the other hand,
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: he seems to have had a fairly reasonable,
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: practical sense that he was kind of the little brother in the relationship and that
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: he had to
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: even before King's tragic assassination,
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: that he had to become his own person to really realize his potential.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he was so happy and proud to get to know King and be treated like this little brother.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: And King would refer to him as the boy from Troy, which is when they first met.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: I won't tell the whole story, but it's in the book.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis quite precociously seeks to integrate Troy State University and just writes a
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_00: cold letter to King saying,
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: who invites him to Montgomery and they explore the possibility it doesn't come to pass.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's the beginning of a real friendship.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: But as is the case,
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: here's a guy who's already world famous and here's just 18 or 20 year old John
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis who thinks of himself as just the boy from the farm.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there is that kind of imbalance in the relationship.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it is true that Lewis knows in time he has to spread his wings, find his own path.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: The other person who is an important mentor to him
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, Lawson was too.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I think my book perhaps shows in greater depth than people will have realized was Bayard Rustin.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: After Lewis leaves SNCC, he spends a year in New York City working for a foundation.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody says he's unhappy in the job.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: He's in an office in Fifth Avenue wearing suits.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not John Lewis.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he did come to like those suits as a congressman.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he spends time with Rustin, who's
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Involved with the crowd around Dissent magazine,
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: I found notes of an interview that Irving Howe did with Lewis and Bayard Rustin,
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: which is like a great find.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we talk about black power as kind of one next path.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: for civil rights activists.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you talk about King finding a new set of issues and causes.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Rustin also had an idea.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote an article called From Protest to Politics,
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: in which he really advocates seizing the opportunity afforded by the Voting Rights
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Act so blacks not only will use the vote,
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: but will go into elective office and use the levers of power that way to continue
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Basically the same fights now for somewhat more intractable problems of jobs and
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: health care and education.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now that some of these battles about segregation have have been won.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: One of the many great reasons for our listeners to read this book.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: is that Lewis's life really shows that struggle to go from activism to
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: institutional power,
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: through the nonprofits,
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: his struggles to get into elective office.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: They're basically like,
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: okay,
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: we have two black candidates,
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: which are we gonna choose to run for this office?
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I wanna back up to Rustin just for a second,
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: because one of the things that's unusual about Lewis is that by the 1980s,
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: and in fact,
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: when he gets elected to Congress,
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's in part because he activates the gay vote in Atlanta,
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: and that's something that people were doing in San Francisco and Chicago and so on.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that Lewis actually learned from Rustin that LGBT politics could be
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: part of the larger fight toward justice that he was committed to?
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: I've never had that thought before, and I just wondered what you thought.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think so, but perhaps not in that specific a sense.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I have no evidence whether he discussed
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: gay or LGBT issues with Rustin ever.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: But he did take from Rustin sort of the larger idea about coalition politics.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I think also the affinity for Jewish groups.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, Rustin was a great supporter of the Jewish community and of Israel his whole life too.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Catholic voters, labor,
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis understood the importance of the coalition,
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: one that should be black and white and increasingly of other races too,
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: not as a way of diminishing the essential need for black people to have their
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: interests recognized after too long,
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: but because that's how you sustain power in governing,
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: is through a coalition.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: And he also, you know, had a district that was mixed race when he gets to Atlanta.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And,
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: he compared it to,
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: say,
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: an Adam Clayton Powell or later someone like a Charlie Rangel or John Conyers in Detroit.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: whose constituents were primarily black,
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: and that,
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: you might say,
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: freed them up or encouraged them to take a certain kind of political set of
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: positions and profile.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Lewis cut it differently,
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: not because he cared any less about the issues that John Conyers and Charlie Rangel
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: cared about,
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: but because he had a different constituency and he,
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: as much as he felt comfortable
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: continuing obligation to represent his black voters,
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: he also felt an obligation to represent his white voters,
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: including,
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: there are black as well as white gay voters and lesbian voters in Atlanta,
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: too,
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: and Jewish voters.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: So for him,
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: it was constantly part of understanding these issues as multifarious,
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_00: even we might say as intersectional.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was not simply a matter of toting up votes.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's very interesting.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it sort of comes back to that theme that we raised earlier around Jewish voters.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so in the sense that people are stigmatized and that stigma needs to be resisted.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, in the 1990s.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis is wearing an AIDS ribbon in Congress and he fights for AIDS funding and so on and so forth.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you're right.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: He sees all these things as intermingled.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I kept thinking about around your wonderful chapter on the
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: March on Washington was that,
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: Rustin was very painfully forced out of the closet at that moment.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: And Lewis saw that happen as a very, very junior member of the movement.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And in a way, some of his later activism
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: to me sort of felt like a memory of that.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this should never happen again to somebody.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: But I also want to talk about Lewis and family.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: So he marries a woman named Lillian who becomes very much a partner in his career.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And some would say the power behind the throne, that it was Lillian that made the hard decisions.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it was Lillian who looked at all the options and figured out what was the best
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: way to push John's career forward.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then they have a son, John Miles, who they adopted.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: But then Lewis, wherever he is, sort of creates more family around him.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: So talk about Lewis and family as a concept for how to make a life.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: he always talked about the beloved community,
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: which,
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: he meant in one sense in the way that King and Lawson and others used it as an
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: ideal society and his ideal vision of society.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: But he also would talk about that Nashville group with whom he was so close in
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: those formative years as a beloved community.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then he talked about his SNCC friends as a beloved community.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: I've even heard him...
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Describe his fellow members of Congress that way,
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: which I don't think was really the case,
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: at least all the time.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: But in those early years,
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: when he first gets to Congress,
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: he does find a certain solidarity and community there.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Look, he comes from a large family of 10 brothers and sisters, cousins everywhere, all over the county.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: They even called it Carter's Quarters.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: His mother's family name was Carter.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it was something that he was always, I think, questing for.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in a strange way, you know, as close as he was to Lillian and as devoted as he was to John Miles...
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well,
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: that was a small family and he was on the road constantly and often in Washington
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: while they were in Atlanta.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: So,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: without diminishing the importance to him of Lillian and John Miles,
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: he's also finding other families.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, his congressional staff.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: There was such like joy and camaraderie in that office.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_00: I got this from talking to so many different staffers that he sort of provided the atmosphere for.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think in some ways he was on a quest to kind of create in his own life a
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: community of friends,
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: of colleagues that could be in the smaller sense of the term,
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: a more tangible sense of the term,
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: a beloved community.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, at the end of his life, he is surrounded by love.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: He actually gets to see a new movement rising, Black Lives Matter.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's that wonderful scene at the end of the book where he's actually close to his
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: death and he goes to Black Lives Matter Plaza and people surround him.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so I actually kind of cried at the end of the book.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: But,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: it was also really great to read this book as we approach this election,
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: David,
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: and to have this man in my head.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I usually ask my guests why people should read this book now.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm going to ask you a different question, which is how would John Lewis help us now?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I think in some ways his relevance to the
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: current moment is pretty damn straightforward.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know if I should...
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: issue a spoiler alert,
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_00: but at the end of the book,
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: I write just a bit about the months after his death,
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: where in the 2020 election,
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: it's remarkable to see how often his name is being invoked by Democrats,
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: by voting rights advocates,
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: everybody doing canvassing drives.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: His name is constantly being bandied about at the Democratic Convention.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's Georgia's fifth district,
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Clayton County,
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: whose ballots provide a critical victory for Joe Biden in the state of Georgia,
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: a state most people didn't expect him to win.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we get to early January 2021.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: You see the victory in the runoff races.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Remember,
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Georgia has this wacky system where they go to a runoff and two senators,
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_00: candidates,
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Democrats running both on John Lewis's legacy.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: One is John Ossoff, a young Jewish man who had been John Lewis's intern.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, what do we have?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: The Capitol riot of January 6th,
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: where Trump's paramilitaries egged on are storming the vote count when they're
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: trying to notarize the official outcome of the election.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it kind of presents before us.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, there was no way to resolve it as I was finishing this book.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we still at this moment have no way to resolve it.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: But these two paths, one of democracy and inclusion and one.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: that upholds violence as a method when elections don't go the way you want.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think these two paths still lie before Americans,
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: and we're struggling and arguing about which choice to make.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: We know which side John Lewis would be on, and we know which side Donald Trump is on.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: But I think it's a crisis point for democracy right now,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: and one that John Lewis's life very much speaks to.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: Let's hope he's watching over us.
• 39:40
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  SPEAKER_01: Why Now is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers to Political Junkie.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Why Now and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
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  SPEAKER_01: That's all for now.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.