JOHN LEWIS, NONVIOLENCE & CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE

John Lewis

Yesterday, we received sad news about the death of John Robert Lewis, the American civil rights leader and politician,  chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and one of the Big Six leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington.

The Grandma wants to pay homage to John Lewis, a symbol of the black struggle in a favour of Civil and Human Rights and against racism and segregation. She considers the best way to pay homage to John Lewis is talking about his life, his activism and his political career.

John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940-July 17, 2020) was an American civil rights leader and politician.

He was a member of the Democratic Party, and was the U.S. Representative for Georgia's 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death. He was also the dean of the Georgia congressional delegation. The district he served includes the northern three-quarters of Atlanta.

Lewis, who as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the Big Six leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington, played many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States.

He became a leader of the Democratic Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving from 1991 as a Chief Deputy Whip and from 2003 as Senior Chief Deputy Whip. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

More information: John Lewis

John Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Troy, Alabama, the third of ten children of Willie Mae and Eddie Lewis. His parents were sharecroppers in rural Pike County, Alabama.

As a young child, Lewis had little interaction with white people; by the time he was six, Lewis had seen only two white people in his life. As he grew older he began taking trips into town with his family, where he experienced racism and segregation, such as at the public library in Troy.

Lewis had relatives who lived in northern cities, and he learned from them that the North had integrated schools, buses, and businesses. When Lewis was 11, an uncle took him on a trip to Buffalo, New York, making him more acutely aware of Troy's segregation.

In 1955, Lewis first heard Martin Luther King Jr. on the radio, and he closely followed King's Montgomery bus boycott later that year. Lewis met Rosa Parks when he was 17, and met King for the first time when he was 18.

John Lewis with Martin Luther King, Jr. (1960)

Lewis graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and then received a bachelor's degree in religion and philosophy from Fisk University. As a student, he was dedicated to the civil rights movement.

He organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and took part in many other civil rights activities as part of the Nashville Student Movement. The Nashville sit-in movement was responsible for the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville.

Lewis was arrested and jailed many times in the nonviolent movement to desegregate the downtown area of the city. He was also instrumental in organizing bus boycotts and other nonviolent protests in the fight for voter and racial equality.

While a student, Lewis was invited to attend nonviolence workshops held at Clark Memorial United Methodist Church by the Rev. James Lawson and Rev. Kelly Miller Smith. There, Lewis and other students became dedicated adherents to the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence, which he practiced for the rest of his life.

In 1961, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. There were seven whites and six blacks who were determined to ride from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans in an integrated fashion. At that time, several southern states continued to enforce laws prohibiting black and white riders from sitting next to each other on public transportation.

More information: My Black History

The Freedom Ride, originated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation and revived by James Farmer and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), was initiated to pressure the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia (1960) that declared segregated interstate bus travel to be unconstitutional.

The Freedom Rides also exposed the passivity of the government regarding violence against citizens of the country who were simply acting in accordance with the law. The federal government had trusted the notoriously racist Alabama police to protect the Riders, but did nothing itself, except to have FBI agents take notes. The Kennedy Administration then called for a cooling-off period, with a moratorium on Freedom Rides.

In 1963, when Charles McDew stepped down as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Lewis, one of the founding members of SNCC, was elected to take over.

John Lewis & The March on Washington (1963)

In 1963, as chairman of SNCC Lewis was named one of the Big Six leaders who were organizing the March on Washington, the occasion of Dr. Martin Luther King's celebrated I Have a Dream speech, along with Whitney Young, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins; Lewis was the youngest of the Big Six.

In 1964, Lewis coordinated SNCC's efforts for Mississippi Freedom Summer, a campaign to register black voters across the South and expose college students from around the country to the perils of African-American life in the South. Lewis traveled the country encouraging students to spend their summer break trying to help people in Mississippi, the most recalcitrant state in the union, to register and vote.

In 1966, Lewis moved to New York City to take a job as the associate director of the Field Foundation. He was there a little over a year before moving back to Atlanta to direct the Southern Regional Council's Community Organization Project. During his time with the SRC, he completed his degree from Fisk University.

In 1970, Lewis became the director of the Voter Education Project (VEP), a position he held until 1977.

More information: The Indian Express

In 1981, Lewis ran for an at-large seat on the Atlanta City Council. He won with 69% of the vote, and served on the council until 1986.

After nine years as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Fowler gave up the seat to make a successful run for the U.S. Senate.

Lewis represented Georgia's 5th congressional district, one of the most consistently Democratic districts in the nation. Since its formalization in 1845, the district has been represented by a Democrat for all but the nine years the seat was vacant when Georgia seceded during the Civil War.

John Lewis Mural, Atlanta (2020)

Lewis opposed the 1991 Gulf War, and the 2000 U.S. trade agreement with China that passed the House. He opposed the Clinton administration on NAFTA and welfare reform.

Lewis drew on his historical involvement in the Civil Rights Movement as part of his politics.

He made an annual pilgrimage to Alabama to retrace the route he marched in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery -a route Lewis worked to make part of the Historic National Trails program.

In March 2003, Lewis spoke to a crowd of 30,000 in Oregon during an anti-war protest before the start of the Iraq War. He was arrested in 2006 and 2009 and outside the Sudan embassy in protest against the genocide in Darfur.

He was one of eight U.S. Representatives, from six states, arrested while holding a sit-in near the west side of the U.S. Capitol building, to advocate for immigration reform. Lewis also led the 2016 House Democrats sit-in demanding that the House take action on gun control in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting and the failure of the United States Senate to act.

More information: ABC News

In 2013, Lewis became the first member of Congress to write a graphic novel, with the launch of a trilogy titled March. The March trilogy is a black and white comics trilogy about the Civil Rights Movement, told through the perspective of civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis. The first volume, March: Book One is written by Lewis and Andrew Aydin, illustrated and lettered by Nate Powell and was published in August 2013, the second volume, March: Book Two was published in January 2015 and the final volume, March: Book Three was published in August 2016.

In an August 2014 interview, Lewis cited the influence of a 1958 comic book, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, on his decision to adapt his experience to the graphic novel format. March: Book One became a number one New York Times bestseller for graphic novels and spent more than a year on the lists. 

On July 17, 2020, Lewis died at the age of 80 in Atlanta, Georgia.

More information: Vox

When you see something that is not right,

not fair, not just, you have to speak up.

You have to say something; you have to do something.

John Lewis

ALICE WALKER, SOCIAL ACTIVISM IN 'THE COLOR PURPLE'

Alice Walker

Today, The Grandma is still resting at home. She continues with the visit of Jordi Santanyí, one of her closest friends and they have continued talking about Literature, something that  they love.

They have chosen Alice Walker, the American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist winner of the Pulitzer Prize and creator of one of the most beautiful novels ever writing, The Color Purple. Walker was born on a day like today in 1944 and they want to homage her talking about her life and her works.

Alice Walker (born February 9, 1944) is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist. In 1982, she wrote the novel The Color Purple, for which she won the National Book Award for hardcover fiction, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote the novels Meridian (1976) and The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970). An avowed feminist, Walker coined the term womanist to mean A black feminist or feminist of color in 1983.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, a rural farming town, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant. Both of Walker's parents were sharecroppers, though her mother also worked as a seamstress to earn extra money. Walker, the youngest of eight children, was first enrolled in school when she was just four years old at East Putnam Consolidated.

When eight, Walker sustained an injury to her right eye after one of her brothers fired a BB gun. Since her family did not have access to a car, Walker could not receive immediate medical attention, causing her to become permanently blind in that eye. It was after the injury to her eye that Walker began to take up reading and writing. The scar tissue was removed when Walker was 14, but a mark still remains. It is described in her essay Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self.

More information: Poetry Foundation

As the schools in Eatonton were segregated, Walker attended the only high school available to blacks: Butler Baker High School. She went there to become valedictorian and enrolled in Spelman College in 1961 after being granted a full scholarship by the state of Georgia for having the highest academic achievements of her class. She found two of her professors, Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, to be great mentors during her time at Spelman, but both were transferred two years later.

Walker was offered another scholarship, this time from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and after the firing of her Spelman professor, Howard Zinn, Walker accepted the offer. Walker became pregnant at the start of her senior year and had an abortion; this experience, as well as the bout of suicidal thoughts that followed, inspired much of the poetry found in Once, Walker's first collection of poetry. Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965.

Alice Walker

Walker wrote the poems of her first book of poetry, Once, while she was a student in East Africa and during her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College.

Walker would slip her poetry under the office door of her professor and mentor, Muriel Rukeyser, when she was a student at Sarah Lawrence. Rukeyser then showed the poems to her agent. Once was published four years later by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Following graduation, Walker briefly worked for the New York City Department of Welfare, before returning to South. She took a job working for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Jackson, Mississippi. Walker also worked as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program.

She later returned to writing as writer-in-residence at Jackson State University (1968–69) and Tougaloo College (1970–71). In addition to her work at Tougaloo College, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970. The novel explores the life of Grange Copeland, an abusive, irresponsible sharecropper, husband and father.

In the fall of 1972, Walker taught a course in Black Women's Writers at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

More information: My Black History

In 1973, before becoming editor of Ms. Magazine, Walker and literary scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered an unmarked grave they believed to be that of Zora Neale Hurston in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Walker had it marked with a gray marker stating ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST / 1901–1960. The line a genius of the south is from Jean Toomer's poem Georgia Dusk, which appears in his book Cane. Hurston was actually born in 1891, not 1901.

Walker's 1975 article In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, published in Ms. Magazine, helped revive interest in the work of this African-American writer and anthropologist.

Alice Walker

In 1976, Walker's second novel, Meridian, was published. Meridian is a novel about activist workers in the South, during the civil rights movement, with events that closely parallel some of Walker's own experiences.

In 1982, she published what has become her best-known work, The Color Purple. The novel follows a young, troubled black woman fighting her way through not just racist white culture but patriarchal black culture as well. The book became a bestseller and was subsequently adapted into a critically acclaimed 1985 movie directed by Steven Spielberg, featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg, as well as a 2005 Broadway musical totaling 910 performances.

Walker has written several other novels, including The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, which featured several characters and descendants of characters from The Color Purple. She has published a number of collections of short stories, poetry, and other writings. Her work is focused on the struggles of black people, particularly women, and their lives in a racist, sexist, and violent society.

More information: PBS

In 2000, Walker released a collection of short fiction, based on her own life, called The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart, exploring love and race relations. In this book, Walker details her interracial relationship with Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a civil rights attorney who was also working in Mississippi. 

The couple married on March 17, 1967 in New York City, since interracial marriage was then illegal in the South, and divorced in 1976. They had a daughter, Rebecca, together in 1969. Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker's only child, is an American novelist, editor, artist, and activist. The Third Wave Foundation, an activist fund, was co-founded by Rebecca and Shannon Liss-Riordan. Her godmother is Alice Walker's mentor and co-founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem.

Alice Walker

In 2007, Walker donated her papers, consisting of 122 boxes of manuscripts and archive material, to Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

In addition to drafts of novels such as The Color Purple, unpublished poems and manuscripts, and correspondence with editors, the collection includes extensive correspondence with family members, friends and colleagues, an early treatment of the film script for The Color Purple, syllabi from courses she taught, and fan mail. The collection also contains a scrapbook of poetry compiled when Walker was 15, entitled Poems of a Childhood Poetess.

In 2013, Alice Walker published two new books, one of them entitled The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way. The other was a book of poems entitled The World Will Follow Joy Turning Madness into Flowers (New Poems).

Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s. She credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. She took part in the 1963 March on Washington. Later, she volunteered to register black voters in Georgia and Mississippi.

More information: Guernica

On March 8, 2003, International Women's Day, on the eve of the Iraq War, Walker was arrested with 26 others, including fellow authors Maxine Hong Kingston and Terry Tempest Williams, at a protest outside the White House, for crossing a police line during an anti-war rally. Walker wrote about the experience in her essay We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

Walker's specific brand of feminism included advocacy of women of color. In 1983, Walker coined the term womanist in her collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, to mean a black feminist or feminist of color. The term was made to unite women of color and the feminist movement at the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression.

Walker states that, 'Womanism' gives us a word of our own,  because it is a discourse of Black women and the issues they confront in society. Womanism as a movement came into fruition in 1985 at the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature to address Black women's concerns from their own intellectual, physical, and spiritual perspectives.

Walker has been a longtime sponsor of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In early 2015, she wrote: So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane than the one we have dominant today.

Download The Color Purple by Alice Walker

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle;

and one faces down fears of today

so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Alice Walker