How did you meet each other?
I met John Lewis at the Atlanta airport about 30 years ago. He came over and said, “You are the young man who represents people on death row.” And I said, “Yeah, I am, and it’s so exciting to meet you.” And he said, “I just want to encourage you to continue your important work.” It meant the world to me that he would do that. This was at a time when support for the type of work I do wasn’t very widespread. This informal encounter has provided me with energy for months.
I was inspired by him long before I met him and I feel really privileged to have spent time with him over the past few years.
How influential was he on your own activism?
I grew up in a poor rural community. Nobody I knew had gone to college, very few people had graduated from high school. I was intrigued by his childhood in Pike County, a rural tenant community. As a teenager, he imagined a life he hadn’t actually seen. He heard Dr. Talk to King on the radio and just texted him. And Dr. King wrote back and invited him to Montgomery. That inspired me incredibly.
He was someone who had this lived experience of segregation with him all his life.
John Lewis experienced the injustice and segregation in the Jim Crow era and it shaped his worldview. This lived experience is very difficult to overcome. If you’ve actually seen these Whites Only signs, you understand that they weren’t instructions, but moral assaults that resulted in real harm. You harm people when you tell them they’re not good enough to walk through the front door, marry someone of a different race, go to school with white kids, be on the beach with white kids. This lived experience motivated him to fight injustice wherever he saw it.
John Lewis (second from left in the main group, wearing white tunic), Dr. Martin Luther King (center) and other civil rights activists arrive in Montgomery, Alabama, after marching from Selma in non-violent protest on March 25, 1965. Photo: Bettmann Archive
He belonged to a generation that was incredibly brave to get directly involved without violence.
He was brave in ways we seldom see. He was one of the original Freedom Riders in the early 1960s and was badly beaten by the police. Just two years later, in 1965, he was at the head of the march on Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and was beaten and beaten again. What many people don’t appreciate is that he and his fellow protesters would do their best to go to these places and then get on their knees and pray, knowing that they would be beaten, beaten, and bloody by the police. There was an absolute expectation of violence and yet they left. That was extraordinary about the courage of John Lewis and the generation he represents. What he and people like him did back then required an incredible commitment. It could have cost her life.
How important was his Christian faith to his activism?
It was incredibly important to him as it was to Dr. King. They both knew they shared a belief with many of the people who oppressed and abused them. Both believed that they had an obligation to challenge people who dishonored that belief because bigotry and segregation ran counter to Christianity and the Gospels. They saw themselves as committed Americans trying to get this country to live up to its values and ideas. In many ways, they were the living proponents of what we now call liberation theology. They protested with a flag in one hand and a Bible in the other.
How important was that to you when John Lewis entered Congress?
Incredible. When I was a kid, there were no black members of Congress. We have not seen any colored people in positions of power and influence. It all happened in the course of John Lewis’ life. You must understand that in the United States we never really had a real change of power. The people who have suffered inequality and injustice, who have turned their backs on thousands of lynchers who have not stepped in to end segregation, are the people who are still in power. So a black person in Congress who, like John Lewis, campaigns for racial justice is not easy. It’s not convenient.
John Lewis presented Bryan Stevenson with the Smithsonian Magazine’s 2012 American Ingenuity Award for Social Progress. Photo: Brendan Hoffman / Getty Images
How would you summarize it?
John Lewis was a visionary. He taught me that justice is a constant struggle, that we never really arrive, we must keep fighting the things that undermine equality and justice, and protect the things that represent equality and justice. He shared his incredibly generous spirit and capacity for love and encouragement directly with me. He always said, “Be brave, Bryan. Don’t let anyone trick you into not being brave. “That kind of confirmation is invaluable. I can’t even articulate the value of it.
He was brave, dedicated, and compassionate. And he had an instinct for doing the things that needed to be done, even if they were challenging and uncomfortable. His life was remarkable and unprecedented in many ways. He inspired people to do difficult things in the service of justice. Very few people have done more to make the world a better place. Interview by Sean O’Hagan
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