An African-American civil rights leader, John Robert Lewis served as a congressman known for his unflagging support of racial integration. As a student in 1964, Lewis went to Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer, the drive to register black voters in that state. He later joined King's voting rights march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, where marchers were met with state troopers, deputies, and posse members who assaulted them with tear gas, fire hoses, and clubs wrapped in barbed wire on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis was knocked to the ground, his skull fractured. As a congressman Lewis continued to pursue his civil rights agenda, tied to his belief in a racially integrated society. Despite Lewis's notable record in Congress, he will likely be most remembered for his fortitude in the 1960s civil rights struggle, as historian Sean Wilentz described him as “a valiant, bloodied hero of the nation's greatest domestic struggle” in the 20th century. See more from CREDO. Must be on campus or login with COM account off campus to access.
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Across That Bridge : Life Lessons and a Vision for Change by Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work/Biography. In Across That Bridge, Congressman John Lewis draws from his experience as a prominent leader of the Civil Rights Movement to offer timeless wisdom, poignant recollections, and powerful principles for anyone interested in challenging injustices and inspiring real change toward a freer, more peaceful society. The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to the protest culture we know today, and the experiences of leaders like Congressman Lewis, a close confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., have never been more relevant. Despite more than forty arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, John Lewis has remained a devoted advocate of the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence. Now, in an era in which the protest culture he helped forge has resurfaced as a force for change, Lewis' insights have never been more relevant. In this heartfelt book, Lewis explores the contributions that each generation must make to achieve change.
His Truth Is Marching On by John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr. A believer in hope above all else, Lewis learned from a young age that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a preacher, practiced by preaching to the chickens he took care of. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it--his first act of non-violent protest. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God, and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the nation-state in the eighteenth century. He did what he did--risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful--not in spite of America, but because of America, and not in spite of religion, but because of religion."
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