http://www.vox.com/2017/1/15/14273532/john-lewis-donald-trump-history
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Donald Trump’s attack on civil rights leader John Lewis, explained
John Lewis is the leader dissenters need in the age of Donald Trump.
Updated by Dara Linddara@xxxxxxx Jan 15, 2017, 12:56pm EST
John Lewis is probably not the person you want to accuse of “all talk,
no action” if you’re the big-talking, Twitter-triggered president-elect
of the United States. Lewis is a leader of the civil rights movement and
30-year veteran of the House of Representatives; he’s a Presidential
Medal of Freedom winner and an American hero.
But on some level, Donald Trump’s tweet lashing out at Lewis (who had
called the president-elect “illegitimate” in an interview with Chuck
Todd on Friday) is totally expected, even inevitable. It’s what Lewis
has been dealing with all his life.
The thing is that, while John Lewis has been engaged in action for
decades, the actions he’s been engaged in haven’t been respected either.
He’s a student of nonviolence who’s been beaten up dozens of times; a
voting-rights activist who, even just a few years after the Voting
Rights Act passed, found himself needing to argue that it was still needed.
Lewis has never been a radical. Anti-segregation, voting rights, black
political leadership — these are all the sort of goals that everyone, in
2017, can get behind. But every step of the way, he’s been
concern-trolled, dismissed, or scolded: told that he is focusing on the
wrong thing, or trying to do the right thing but going about it the
wrong way.
But there’s a fine line, when an activist is being scolded by those in
power, between denunciation and delegitimization.
Trump’s tweets appeared to be totally impulsive; it’s practically
routine, at this point, for the president-elect to fire off some
early-morning tweets complaining about someone who criticized him the
day before, and Lewis was simply Saturday’s chosen target. But the way
that Trump attacked Lewis — and the way the president-elect has talked
about black communities, politicians and activists throughout his
campaign and pre-presidency — is part of a pattern of delegitimizing
dissent in general, and black dissent in particular.
Trump’s tweets were essentially a “what about black on black crime?”
Trump’s tweets weren’t exactly accusing Lewis of not having accomplished
anything — even though that’s what the “all talk, talk, talk — no action
or results” made it sound like.
The three tweets, taken together, make it clear: Trump’s problem with
Lewis is that he’s not focusing on the issues Trump thinks he should
care about. As far as Trump is concerned, Lewis’ opinions can be safely
ignored because his congressional district (which includes most of the
city of Atlanta, as well as some of its most affluent suburbs) is
supposedly “falling apart,” “crime-infested,” “burning.” If Lewis really
cared about America, he’d fix that problem first.
The argument Trump is making, though not in so many words, is: Well,
John Lewis, what about black-on-black crime?
Par for the course with Trump, this argument bears little relation to
the facts. Atlanta is the heart of the black middle class in America.
And while the city has a relatively high violent crime rate, it is
almost certainly not as dangerous as Donald Trump (who routinely claims
that America’s murder rate is at a 50-year high, and claims that black
Americans “can’t walk out the door without getting shot”) thinks it is.
But this is the typical way that Donald Trump talks about black
communities. His way of expressing sympathy for black America is to
lament the fact that they live in crime-ridden hellholes thanks to the
supposed neglect of politicians like John Lewis.
Time and again, he conflates black residents with the “inner city,” and
characterizes inner cities as a lawless, crumbling dump — not to mention
a place where all votes are fraudulently cast. It’s a characterization
that resembles actual black America (or increasingly-nonblack urban
America) less than it resembles 1980s dystopias like Escape from New
York and Demolition Man. And that’s exactly the point.
Trump’s rhetoric isn’t really for the people who actually live in cities
or in black communities. It’s for white suburbanites who, because they
deliberately avoid cities, haven’t updated their idea of what cities are
like beyond Reagan-era stereotypes.
If you believe that black Americans really are in danger of being gunned
down by criminals every time they open their doors, of course you’d be
baffled that politicians from black communities ever talk about anything
else — and a little upset with those politicians for ignoring the real
issues when they do. You might conclude that they don’t really care
about the disorder plaguing their communities.
But of course, the same line of thinking is what leads people to
characterize black-led protests as themselves a form of disorder. The
assumption that black communities are inherently unruly places makes it
easy to fail to distinguish between a Black Lives Matter “protest” and a
“riot”; to assume that anything law enforcement officers are doing in
black neighborhoods is needed to keep the peace, and therefore any
complaints about it are ungrateful or even dangerous.
Donald Trump’s nomination speech conflated Black Lives Matter protests
with the Dallas police shootings. His nominee for Attorney General, Jeff
Sessions, emphasized during his confirmation hearings this week that
criticism of police departments (by activists and the Obama
administration alike) has led to a spike in violent crime in cities like
Chicago and Baltimore.
The upshot is that there is no such thing as a legitimate political
action that comes from black communities. Speech (as long as it
challenges the status quo) is irrelevant. Voting is fraudulent; elected
leaders are illegitimate. Protest is disorderly or anarchistic.
There is no “action.” There is only “trouble.”
It’s a bind with which John Lewis is intimately familiar.
John Lewis was committed to nonviolent protest back when nonviolence was
seen as a provocation
John Lewis was a student of nonviolence. In 1958, as a Baptist seminary
student in Nashville, he started attending nonviolence workshops led by
James Lawson; “these workshops dealt with the question of philosophy,
the discipline of nonviolence, the whole history of the struggle in
India led by Ghandi and his attempt to organize in South Africa—building
it on the whole idea of Christian faith,” as he later explained to
interviewers from the Southern Oral History Program in 1973.
In the story of the civil rights movement that most people (especially
most white people) have in 2017, that puts Lewis on the “right side” of
the movement — the nonviolent protests of the early 1960s, focused on
desegregation and voting rights, rather than the “radical militants” of
the late 1960s. (Indeed, Lewis left the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee in 1965, after Stokely Carmichael was elected to lead it,
because he felt the group was no longer as strongly committed to
nonviolence as Lewis himself was.)
But while that distinction seems perfectly clear and sensible in 2017 —
a clear demarcation of a “right” and “wrong” way to take action, and
right and wrong things to take action about — it’s hardly a distinction
that existed at the time. Nonviolent protests were met with violence
from white civilians and law enforcement alike.
When Lewis took part in lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in late 1959
and early 1960, he told the oral-history interviewers, white teenagers
would pull “students off the seats or put lighted cigarettes down their
backs, that type of thing. We continued to sit.”
INTERVIEWERS:
Was any of that done to you?
JOHN LEWIS:
I was hit, but never a lighted cigarette or anything like that.
INTERVIEWERS:
Was it painful?
JOHN LEWIS:
Oh, yes. We refused to strike back.
After one of those incidents, Lewis and the other student protesters
were arrested. It was Lewis’ first arrest (he had just turned 20); there
would be over 40 more over the course of his career.
In retrospect, everyone loves the nonviolence of the early-1960s Civil
Rights Movement. At the time, though, the movement’s insistence on
nonviolent mass mobilization was seen by most of white America — even
outside the South — as ineffective at best and unhelpful at worst. A
plurality of Americans had an unfavorable view of the 1963 March on
Washington; Martin Luther King’s favorability ratings declined
throughout the 1960s. And even Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy tried
to push civil-rights groups, in 1962, to stop holding protests for a
while and focus on voter registration instead. (The NAACP agreed; SNCC,
led at the time by Lewis, did not.)
Lewis got his skull cracked open in the name of law and order
Opposition to desegregation wasn’t just expressed as outright white
supremacy — it was a defense of “law and order.” John Lewis got arrested
dozens of times because he broke dozens of laws — either laws of
segregation themselves, or laws (often ad-hoc injunctions) specifically
designed to stymie black activism.
When Lewis spent 37 days at Parchman Farm, the infamous Mississippi
prison, during the 1961 Freedom Rides, it was (as he characterized it in
a 2014 tweet) for using a “white” restroom.
When he, King and others started the Selma Campaign at the beginning of
1965 (dramatized in the 2015 movie Selma) it wasn’t just because of
massive resistance on the part of white poll workers to registering
black voters — it was because of an injunction that had been passed
prohibiting three or more people from gathering together and talking
about civil rights or voting. (During the campaign, Gov. George Wallace
added an injunction banning nighttime protests in the cities of Selma
and Marion.)
These laws were unjust and unequally enforced, but they were laws. When
Jimmie Lee Jackson was killed in Marion during a protest, he was killed
as a lawbreaker. When Lewis had his skull fractured by law enforcement
officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 — “Bloody Sunday”
— while trying to march from Selma to Montgomery, he was in violation of
an order to disperse.
Lewis led the marchers back to a church and (in the words of the New
York Times’ article from the time) “made a speech to the crowd huddled
angry and weeping in the sanctuary.” Only then did he go to the hospital
to get his skull patched up.
“Bloody Sunday” is generally regarded as the moral high point of the
civil rights movement, the point where public opinion shifted decisively
in favor of voting rights for black Americans. (Lewis said in the early
1970s that “If there is any single event that gave birth to the Voter
Rights Act, it was the Selma effort.”)
Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark went to his grave denying anyone was
hurt on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (he claimed they “all fell down in one
big swoop” and “some might have hit their head when they fell down”). In
2006, he said that he’d do it all over again if he had to: “I did what I
thought was right to uphold the law.”
Lewis has spent the last five decades getting told he’s doing black
leadership wrong
Focusing on Lewis’ role in the Civil Rights Movement runs the risk of
making it seem like he’s just been coasting since then — like he’d
stopped contributing to American history after the age of 25. But the
more accurate way to think about it is that Lewis has spent the rest of
his career trying to persuade other people that the fight for civil
rights wasn’t won in 1965, and other people haven’t always been as
willing to listen. Lewis’ actions at the beginning of his career have
been lionized — often as a way to diminish the significance of the
problems he’s identified through the next five decades.
In the early 1970s, Lewis served as head of the Voter Education Project
— turning it into an independent activist organization dedicated to
registering black Southern voters. (At one point, when Mississippi
kicked all voters off the rolls and forced them to reregister, Lewis and
Julian Bond held thirty-nine voter-mobilization events in 25 Mississippi
counties — over the course of six days.) But as early as 1971 — six
years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act — he found himself
having to argue that it was still necessary.
“We have to look beyond the glowing reports of a new South,” he told the
House Judiciary Committee during a 1971 hearing.
“We have to recognize the fallacies of those who would tell us that
Federal registrars and observers are no longer needed. We cannot allow
ourselves to be duped into believing that, in these so-called new and
changing times, the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed. The figures
of unregistered black voters indicate there is still a need for active
enforcement of the Voting Rights Act — active enforcement which we have
not seen in some time."
Lewis testified before Congress on the need for the VRA again in 1975 —
and again in 2013, the year after the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby
County v. Holder struck down the section of the Voting Rights Act giving
the federal government automatic oversight of voting regulations in
certain (mostly Southern) areas. The argument made by Chief Justice John
Roberts in the Shelby County case wasn’t dissimilar to the “new South”
arguments Lewis was arguing against in 1971 — that the law had served
its purpose, and social change had made discrimination a thing of the past.
For nearly 40 years, Lewis has been an elected official (first as an
Atlanta city council member, and then, starting in 1986, as a member of
the House); in other words, he’s followed the injunction often given to
activists that if they want to really change things, they should go into
electoral politics. And indeed, he (like many black politicians in the
1980s) took the sort of “tough” stance on criminal-justice that Trump’s
faulting him for not taking today (he once challenged Julian Bond to
take a drug test when the two ran against each other for Congress in 1986).
His role in the House has been less one of legislative leadership than
moral leadership; he’s been called the “conscience of the Congress.” To
a large extent, this is because he’s now accepted to be on the right
side of history; it’s no longer controversial to believe that when Lewis
was beaten down for refusing to get off the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he was
doing the right thing even though he was blocking traffic.
As Lewis himself has taken to putting it, the trouble he got into in the
1960s was “good trouble; necessary trouble.” And history has recognized
it as such.
But when Lewis has stepped into issues that are controversial, it’s
become clear that deference to the “conscience of the Congress” only
goes so far — that there’s still a tendency to dismiss people for
expressing dissent the “wrong way,” even if they’re Presidential Medal
of Freedom winners.
Lewis was one of the leaders of the 2016 House Democratic “sit-in” over
gun violence after the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. In
Trump’s framework, it was “talk” instead of “action” — the sit-in didn’t
succeed, insofar as Congress didn’t pass the bill Democrats were
fighting for.
But the reaction by House Republicans proved that “talk” can nonetheless
be threatening or even dangerous. Republicans shut off the cameras in
the House chamber; they met with the sargeant-at-arms after the sit-in
to consider punishing Democrats for violating House rules; and they
subsequently passed a rule banning cell-phone cameras on the House floor.
Lewis saw it as #GoodTrouble (which he turned into a hashtag for the
occasion, in response to the criticism); his opponents saw it as a threat.
By the same token, Lewis has been unfettered in his criticism of Trump
on moral grounds. In March 2016 — after Trump canceled a rally in
Chicago and then claimed it was because of violent protests — Lewis
brought back a refrain associated with criticism of Sen. Joe McCarthy:
Calling a president-elect “illegitimate” is certainly not the sort of
thing that members of the House of Representatives typically do. It’s
controversial. It’s causing trouble. But John Lewis knows that. Lewis
believes he’s making trouble for the right reasons: good trouble.
Trump’s disturbing tendency to delegitimize dissent
You’d think that Trump, a negotiator who understands PR as an arena and
often has little in the way of scruples about the right way to win,
would understand and respect Lewis’ skills in using protest to dramatize
dissent.
No.
Donald Trump is a tremendously thin-skinned man. He doesn’t tend to
respect dissent of any kind when it’s directed against him.
This isn’t to imply that Trump’s tweets criticizing Lewis were part of
some sort of strategic crackdown. They weren’t strategic. They were
impulsive. But Trump, and those around him, have an unsettling tendency
to see dissent as inherently illegitimate — sour grapes at best and
sedition at worst.
Trump’s stab at Lewis comes at the end of a week in which Trump staff
have threatened to ban a critical journalist from future press events,
while allies have called to prevent “mainstream” reporters from even
covering him as president. Some Democratic members of the House aren’t
getting tickets to Trump’s inauguration.
And while Trump hasn’t spoken out yet about the plans for a massive
“women’s march” the day after his inauguration, it’s hard to shake off
the memory of his reaction to the protests spurred by his election:
calling them “very unfair” and claiming protesters were paid.
There is no correct way to dissent, in this framework. Speak out about
the “wrong” thing, and it’s “all talk”; do something, and you’re a threat.
It’s an extremely uncomfortable situation for a dissenter to be in. But
there are worse role models for such a dissenter to have than John
Lewis. John Lewis has been in that bind all his life.