GETTING INTO “GOOD TROUBLE”

“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” John Lewis, June 2018

The Hon. John Robert Lewis – February 21, 1940 - July 17, 2020 The Rev. Cordy Tindell “CT” Vivian – July 30, 1924 - July 17, 2020

How shall we remember these lions of the Civil Rights Movement? What is the worth of a man who spends his whole life getting into “good trouble”?

On the same day in 2020, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the first author chronicling the Civil Rights Movement (1970) passed away.

Within hours of each other, the only one of the March on Washington “Big Six” to go to Congress (17 consecutive terms), and the most prolific and long-running civil rights organizer took their last breaths.

Who could have imagined that these two men, separated in age by 15 years, who lived parallel lives as they worked together in the Civil Rights Movement, would spend the last 50 years residing in the same city, Atlanta, and would die on the same day?

Both men were Baptist Ministers Both worked together with the Nashville, TN Student Movement Both men participated in the Freedom Rides of 1961 Both were arrested on July 7, 1961 and spent time in Parchman Prison, Mississippi Both were leaders in the organization of the March on Washington Both were subjected to violence and police brutality, and were jailed multiple times Both were recipients of multiple honors and awards Both men received the country’s highest honor: the Medal of Freedom Both men were famously effective at organizing, advocating and persuading people

In his famous speech of 9/12/2014, “What is a man worth?”, CT Vivian questioned how our value as African Americans was to be measured, since we were brought to the U.S. by deception and sold as property. Could a man’s worth be measured by the price paid for him? Can we, as children of God, be valued based on the work or services we provide?

1 Today, as we bid goodbye to these two giants of the Civil Rights Movement, and as we consider all the great things they have accomplished to advance the struggle for equity and freedom, the question answers itself. Reviewing their lives and accomplishments reminds us that no effort to debase us as property, to deny our liberty, to prevent our literacy, or to refuse us the franchise can ever negate our sacred humanity. Although a debt remains owed to African

Americans as major contributors to construction of the greatest economy on earth, the two great lives of Lewis and Vivian, free of hatred, bitterness or revenge, continue to inspire us, and show us the path to a greater tomorrow.

In 1924, Cordy Tindell Vivian was born in Boonville, Missouri, and raised from an early age in Illinois. He had early instincts to right the wrongs of injustice. In his first job after college, at the Carver Community Center in Peoria, IL, he participated in sit-in demonstrations there that successfully desegregated the Barton’s Cafeteria in 1947. When he moved to Nashville, TN to study for the ministry at American Baptist Theological Seminary, he joined the Nashville Student

Movement, where students from American Baptist, Fisk and Tennessee State were learning and practicing nonviolence, and engaging in direct action protest. There, he met John Lewis, a teen who was also studying for ministry at American Baptist, and who, along with Diane Nash and other student organizers, was learning the Mohandas Gandhi method of nonviolent action under

James Lawson, as part of the Nashville Student Movement.

John Lewis, a native of Troy, Alabama, was born in 1940 to a sharecropping family. He aspired to be a preacher from the age of 5, and preached his first public sermon at age 15. As he experienced discrimination and segregation in his own town, he became activated around issues of the Civil Rights Movement as he followed the work of Dr. Martin Luther King and the 1955

2 Montgomery Bus Boycott. His own civil rights activity began to take shape once he moved to

Nashville, Tennessee to attend seminary, and there he organized and participated in sit-in demonstrations, bus boycotts and protest marches as part of the Nashville Student Movement.

C.T. Vivian joined in their activities to fight against segregated lunch counters and public transportation. In April 1960, Vivian and Diane Nash, led a peaceful march of 4,000 students down to City Hall to discuss these problems with Nashville Mayor, Ben West, which led to West making a public statement denouncing racial discrimination

Both Lewis and Vivian were arrested and jailed countless times. Both endured attacks and beatings at the hands of counter-protesters, the Ku Klux Klan, prison guards and police. Yet, they never fought back, and they continued to stand firm in the truth that freedom must be won.

During the Freedom Rides of 1961, Lewis was attacked and beaten several times. The

Freedom Rides were initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court rulings, Keys vs. Carolina Coach Company (1955), specifically declaring segregation in interstate bus travel as unconstitutional, and Boynton vs. Virginia (1960), which also outlawed segregation in restaurants and terminals of interstate bus stations. The Freedom Riders were within their rights to oppose the Jim Crow segregation laws, and the federal government was slow to intervene and protect them. Lewis, at age 21, was the first rider to be assaulted during the

Freedom Rides, when he attempted to enter a whites only waiting room in South Carolina, and two White men attacked him, disfiguring his face, kicking him in the ribs and injuring him severely.

Yet, two weeks later Lewis was on the Freedom Ride to Mississippi, where both he and

Vivian were among many who were arrested and imprisoned in Mississippi’s notorious

3 Parchman Prison. According to Lewis, the governor had ordered the guards to break the riders’ spirits. Lewis was kept there for 40 days; Vivian was brutally beaten by prison guards. The courage of these civil rights leaders was phenomenal – as they faced danger, endured violent attacks and imprisonment, risking injury and death. Lewis later said, "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal. We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back." (“The Freedom Riders, Then and Now”, Smithsonian

Magazine, 9/24/12).

Such was the courage of these young people that, when the Freedom Rides organizer,

Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) abandoned the Freedom Rides project as becoming too violent, Lewis and Diane Nash were among the Nashville Student Movement leaders who took up the cause and re-organized the Freedom Rides. Nash insisted on continuing the rides believing that the nonviolent action of Freedom Rides was necessary despite the dangers they were facing at the hands of mobs and lawless police. The student leaders gathered groups of Blacks and

Whites to continue the rides into major cities in the Deep South. There the buses were often met by unruly mobs and the Ku Klux Klan, supported and condoned by the police. The riders were routinely beaten, left unconscious on the roadside, ambulances would refuse to take them to the hospital, the buses bombed and burned, and the riders were imprisoned. Yet they kept on riding.

At least 436 people took part in over 60 freedom rides, from May to December 1961. Finally, the

Interstate Commerce Commission issued federal regulations directing state compliance with the federal laws against segregation in interstate transportation.

The Freedom Rides were a success. The Freedom Riders had won for Blacks the right to travel anywhere, sit anywhere, eat anywhere, and use any restroom in any town that they pleased.

4 In 1963, Lewis was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington, where Martin

Luther King gave his “I have a Dream” speech. The march and the continued nonviolent protests led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In 1965, Lewis and Vivian traveled to Alabama to support the efforts of the Montgomery

Improvement Association to demand voting rights for Blacks, who were facing barriers to their right to register and vote, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, brute force, deception and imprisonment. Lewis was one of the student leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC), and Vivian represented the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC).

That February, as Vivian stood on the courthouse steps demanding that Black people be allowed to enter and register, an officer sucker punched him and knocked him to the ground. Vivian simply stood back up and continued to make his case. The officers blocking the courthouse door arrested and jailed Vivian. The entire scene was caught on TV cameras and broadcast nationwide.

Not one month later, on March 7, Lewis was among the leaders who crossed the Edmund

Pettus Bridge, in a peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery, on the way to the Alabama

Capitol to demand the right to vote. Police waiting at the end of the bridge ordered the marchers to turn around, but before they could comply, the police attacked and brutally beat them. Lewis’ skull was fractured and he had a concussion. Another demonstrator, Amelia Boynton, was beaten unconscious and left at the edge of the bridge. The day was dubbed “Bloody Sunday”. When the marchers set out from Selma again on March 21, Lewis was among them as they marched into

Montgomery and held a rally on the Capitol steps. Five months later the Voting Rights Act of

1965 became law.

5 Lewis became the director of SNCC from 1963 to 1966. He also worked for a year in

New York before returning to the South and settling in Atlanta. Every job that Lewis held, throughout his life, was to further the work of the Civil Rights Movement. Once he relocated to

Atlanta he was elected to the City Council, and by 1986, he was elected to Congress, where he served for over 34 years. In Congress, Lewis was seen as the Dean of the Atlanta delegation, and the “Conscience of the Congress”. His agenda never deviated from serving the movement and fighting for the rights of Black people, the poor and the disenfranchised.

As Democratic Representative for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, an area covering the northern three quarters of Atlanta, Lewis was a staunch and progressive Democratic, yet fiercely independent. He characterized himself as a strong and adamant liberal. His work, and the votes he cast, always reflected his civil rights bent; yet he was quick to form coalitions and to defend the rights of all races.

In 1988, the year after he was sworn in to Congress, Lewis introduced a bill to create a

National African American Museum. The bill failed due to opposition from the Senate, specifically by Senator Jesse Helms. Lewis continued to introduce the bill with each new

Congress, and it continued to fail every year. In 2002, Senator Helms did not seek re-election;

Lewis gained bipartisan support for the bill and it passed the Senate. That is why we have the

National Museum of African American History and Culture today, a branch of the Smithsonian

Institute, standing adjacent to the Washington Memorial. The museum had its grand opening in

September 2016, with President Barack Obama as the keynote speaker.

Lewis continued his close association with the Civil Rights Movement, and this association continued to inform his political choices and votes in Congress. He honored the

6 legacy of crossing the Edmun Pettus Bridge by an annual re-enactment on the anniversary each

March, and this became a pilgrimage that many lawmakers in the House and Senate made with him annually. In 2015, on the 50th Anniversary of the march, President Obama and many key public figures locked arms and made the symbolic march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, along with Lewis, and Amelia Boynton, who had been knocked unconscious by police on Bloody

Sunday in 1965.

Today the calls are resounding for the Edmund Pettus Bridge to be renamed, the John

Lewis Bridge.

Even while in Congress, Lewis was keenly aware of his right to protest, and to stand with those who were fighting for justice – even if it meant being arrested. In March, 2003, he spoke to a crowd of 30,000 in Oregon in opposition to the Iraq War; he peacefully protested and was arrested in 2006; and again in 2009, opposing the genocide in Darfur, Sudan; then again in 2013, advocating for immigration reform. In 2016, he co-led a sit-in in Congress for almost 26 hours, demanding a vote on gun-safety legislation. Lewis stood up for what he believed, and was always willing to stand for right – he was willing to get into “good trouble, necessary trouble”. He kept in his bosom a fearless and determined spirit to fight for justice, and he did so at the expense of his own personal comfort and safety.

In 2013, Lewis became the first member of Congress to write a graphic novel, March, which evolved into a trilogy (March Two in 2015; March Three in 2016), a black and white comic strip that Lewis co-wrote with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell, telling of the Civil Rights

Movement from Lewis’ perspective. In 2018 they co-wrote a companion piece, Run. The series has received numerous awards, has been on the New York Times Bestseller List, and has a

7 9.6/10 rating in reviews.

Vivian’s legacy will be the number of productive organizations that he formed in service of the movement, and the more than 6,000 volumes that comprise his library. In 1970, Vivian wrote the first book on the movement written by a member of Martin Luther King’s staff: Black

Power and the American Myth. He was a prolific writer and a frequent speaker at churches, colleges, businesses and other organizations, and he was a consultant to corporations about race issues. In 2007, when President Obama spoke at Brown Chapel in Selma on the anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march, he introduced Vivian in the words of Martin Luther King, as

“the greatest preacher to ever live”.

As early as 1965, Vivian created the educational program, Vision, which gave higher education scholarships to 702 Alabama students; the initiative later became the well-known

Upward Bound program. Among the other organizations that were founded by Vivian are:

BASIC, a consultancy on multi-culturalism and race relations; the Center for Democratic

Renewal, which he co-founded with Ann Braden to work against white supremacist activity;

Capital City Bank and Trust Co., a Black-owned Atlanta bank where he served on the Board; and the CT Vivian Leadership, Inc. (CTVLI), where he served until his last days – an organization founded to create a model leadership culture in Atlanta. CTVLI conceived and developed the

“Yes, We Care” program, and in 2008 they came to the aid of Morris Brown College (an

HBCU), which had to temporarily close when the city cut off their water services. Through “Yes,

We Care”, CTVLI raised over $500,000 that was then used to reinstate Morris Brown and keep the college open and viable.

8 Vivian was a guest speaker at workshops and conferences all over the world, a guest on

TV talk shows; and he offered remarks at the United Nations. He was the subject of, or featured in, several documentaries such as Eyes on the Prize and The Healing Ministry of Dr. C.T. Vivian, and the biography: Challenge and Change: The Story of Civil Rights Activist C.T. Vivian.

In 2002, Rev. C.T. Vivian was awarded an honorary degree from Duke University; and in

2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the Medal of Freedom.

Hon. John Lewis received numerous awards and 32 honorary degrees, including from several Ivy League and HBCU institutions. In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded him the

Medal of Freedom.

John R. Lewis and C.T. Vivian lived their entire lives for the Civil Rights Movement.

Even though they served in many diverse ways, their lives show amazing parallels, culminating in their deaths on the same day in Atlanta. Each will be remembered for his selfless and unwavering contributions to the movement. Each has left a legacy of self-sacrifice and service.

And, each has blazed a trail and cleared a path that the rest of us may follow as we continue to walk towards freedom, equity and justice. Let us never forget what these brave men gave up for all our sakes. Let us honor their legacy by continuing the work of speaking truth to power, and remaining firm in the fight for what is right. In the words of Lewis, let us “never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

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