His Truth Is Marching On by Jon Meacham

Author:Jon Meacham [Meacham, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

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At this moment on Highway 80, in the Deep South of a Cold War America unchanged in so many ways from Civil War America, John Lewis’s life reached a kind of crescendo. He was still so young—he had turned twenty-five two weeks before—and yet there on that strip of road he was like a martyr or a prophet of old. For all the complexities of race and identity and power and love and hate, for all the dreams fulfilled and dreams deferred, for all the panoply and pain of history, this much, at least, was simple at that hour and that place in Selma: The forces of good were pitted against the forces of evil. The marchers were asking a nation to live up to its word that all were created equal, and the nation, in the form of those troopers and deputies and demonstrators, was saying, as Sheriff Clark’s lapel pin put it, “Never.”

History isn’t always like this. In fact, it’s rarely like this. We impose order on the disorder of the past, weaving together multiple strands, disparate events, muddled motives—what William James called reality’s “blooming, buzzing confusion.” With Selma, however, the narrative need not be neatened. The facts speak for themselves.

Facing Major Cloud, Lewis drew on the lessons learned under Jim Lawson. “I wasn’t about to turn around,” Lewis recalled. “We were there. We were not going to run….We could have gone forward, marching right into the teeth of those troopers. But that would have been too aggressive, I thought, too provocative. God knew what might have happened if we had done that. These people were ready to be arrested, but I didn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

The wind riffling his tan trench coat, Lewis pondered what to do. “We couldn’t go forward,” he recalled. “We couldn’t go back. There was only one option left that I could see.” He would not fight—not with a weapon of this world, but with a weapon of the world he was seeking to bring into being.

“We should kneel and pray,” Lewis said to a nodding Williams.

They wouldn’t have time. A moment had passed since Cloud had issued his final warning. “You saw these men putting on their gas masks,” Lewis said. Now he heard Cloud’s voice pierce the air.

“Troopers,” the major cried, “advance!”

Within seconds—to Lewis it seemed instantaneous—the wave of blue struck. He remembered the enormity, the totality, of the reaction of his attackers. “The troopers and possemen swept forward as one, like a human wave, a blur of blue shirts and billy clubs and bullwhips,” Lewis recalled. “We had no chance to turn and retreat.” The pain was to be endured. There was no help for it.

“They came toward us, and Hosea said, ‘John, they’re going to gas us,’ ” Lewis recalled. “They came with all types of force, beating us with nightsticks, trampling us with horses. I was the first person to be hit. My feet, my legs went from under me. I was knocked down.” Charles Mauldin, a seventeen-year-old who was in the third row of the column, heard the blow.

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