John Lewis: A Life

The late civil rights activist and congressman is a paragon of idealism and rectitude in this admiring biography. Rutgers historian Greenberg (Republic of Spin) provides a rousing account of Lewis’s youth, from his childhood as the bookish son of a Black farm couple in Alabama under Jim Crow to his participation in pivotal actions as a leader of the Nashville Student Movement and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These included sit-ins and protests to desegregate Nashville’s lunch counters, movie theaters, and hotels; the 1961 Freedom Rides to desegregate Southern bus stations, during which Lewis was savagely beaten by a white mob in Montgomery, Ala.; and the 1965 Selma voting-rights marches, at which Lewis’s skull was fractured by a state trooper’s club. Greenberg paints Lewis as a stalwart exponent of nonviolence who was genuinely devoted to a Christian ethic of forgiveness—he later reconciled with Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace and with an ex-Klansman who apologized for punching him out—and shrewdly analyzes how the movement’s shifting ideologies eventually put Lewis at odds with younger, more militant activists, leading to his ouster from the SNCC. The book’s later chapters follow Lewis’s career in congress, where he served as a sort of living reminder of the civil rights movement, by turns excoriating and cajoling legislators to recall the lessons of history. It’s a rewarding profile in fortitude. (Oct.)