After Rep. John Lewis, We Are Still In Search Of That “Beloved Community”

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(OPINION) In death, Rep. John Robert Lewis assembled the “Beloved Community” one last time that allowed a new generation of activists to witness people of different races and political ideologies take part in a moment bigger than themselves.

But one must go beyond the speeches of three former presidents: George W. Bush, William Clinton and Barack Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to appreciate the significance of the gathering at the Horizon chapel of the Ebenezer Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta.

”As a boy, John listened through the door after bedtime as his father’s friends complained about the Klan,” President Obama said during the eulogy. “One Sunday, as a teenager, he heard Dr. King preach on the radio. As a college student in Tennessee, he signed up for Jim Lawson’s workshops on the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience.”

Like Diane Nash, James Bevel, C.T. Vivian and others, President Obama said that John Lewis showed up in Nashville in 1959 to take a class that wasn’t part of the curriculum at Fisk University.

”John Lewis was getting something inside his head, an idea he couldn’t shake that took hold of him,” Obama said, ”that nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience were the means to change laws, but also change hearts, and change minds, and change nations and change the world.”

It has been six decades since many college graduates and students came to Nashville to learn the doctrine of nonviolence. At the age of 91, Rev. Jim Lawson showed during the funeral of his most devoted disciple that he had one more lesson to teach at this critical moment in history.

"John Lewis practiced the politics not of what we call bipartisan, John Lewis practiced the politics of We the People. The politics of the preamble of the constitution of the United States, ” Lawson said during his 21-minute message at the funeral. He added that while many books have been written about the Civil Rights period, most people get it ”wrong,” when it comes to telling the story of John Lewis.  “This is the 60th [anniversary] year of the sit-ins. It was not an accident that we used students.”

Quoting Martin Luther King, Lawson said, “Christian love has power that we have never tapped, and if we use it, we will not only transform our own lives, but we will transform the earth of which we live.”

In the summer of 1964 Bernard Demzcuk was a white student from Baltimore who had been recruited by SNCC for the campaign to integrate Cambridge Maryland. “I was recruited because I was white and I spent hours on Route 50 holding up a sign to people traveling to Ocean City,” said Demzcuk, now 71, in an interview with Religion Unplugged. Demzcuk said he spends time training police officers in places like Seattle, Los Angeles and Washington DC about the Civil Rights movement, Black History and racial sensitivity and awareness.

“Every police officer in D.C. was mandated to take a 10-hour course with me and to go to African American Museum of History and Culture,” Demzcuk said. “What does this mean? The Black community in America know the police but the police however do not know the Black community.”

Demzcuk said that, for more than 300 years, police departments have been filled with immigrants from Ireland and other European countries who came to the US after the Great Potato famine and they joined police departments in places like New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore where they developed a culture to maintain law and order and to keep minority groups in their place.

“When you add slavery and Jim Crow together you have 349 years where the police were used to enforce white supremacy and culture and society,” Demzcuk said. “Today, we have a new period where the police are being used to support white nationalism and that is what you are seeing in Portland and Seattle.”

On July 22, President Donald Trump addressed the nation to announce forming a joint task force to address rising violence in American cities as some violent groups have mixed with peaceful protesters and created violent outcomes:

”In recent weeks, there has been a radical movement to defund, dismantle, and dissolve our police departments. Extreme politicians have joined this anti-police crusade and relentlessly vilified our law enforcement heroes. To look at it from any standpoint, the effort to shut down policing in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders, and heinous crimes of violence. This bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end. Today, I’m announcing a surge of federal law enforcement into American communities plagued by violent crime. We’ll work every single day to restore public safety, protect our nation’s children, and bring violent perpetrators to justice. We’ve been doing it, and you’ve been seeing what’s happening all around the country. We’ve just started this process, and, frankly, we have no choice but to get involved.”

But Civil Rights activist and religious leaders see things another way. During the service Lawson said, ”If we would honor and celebrate John Lewis’ life, let us then re-commit our souls, our hearts, our minds, our bodies and our strength to the continuing journey to dismantle the wrong in our midst and to allow the space for the new earth and new heaven to emerge.” 

A year before he died, Dr. Martin Luther King exiled himself in Jamaica and lived in a rented house without a phone. There, he finished the manuscript of his final book: “Where do we go from here? Chaos or Community.” In that book, he laid his vision for the future of America in terms of better jobs, decent housing, quality education and a brighter future for people of color.

That question is being asked today from pulpits in sanctuaries to zoom chats in colleges and Black Lives Matter Plaza across from the White House to police departments across the country.

The tactic of outsiders mixing in with peaceful protesters and then getting attacked by law enforcement is nothing new. In her statement about the death of John Lewis, D.C. Delegate to Congress Eleanor Holmes Norton said this is what happened when she worked as a legal observer.

“SNCC would kneel and assume other nonviolent postures. On the other side were not counter- demonstrators,” Norton said. “On the other side were no other people who were confronting us nonviolently. On the other side were the police leading white mobs. They were befuddled by the tactics of SNCC and the civil rights movement. Because when you kneel and are nonviolent, they didn’t quite know what to do with you.”

Joshua Dubois, who served a key faith advisor to President Obama, said, “We have to have leaders who speak to the best of us and not the worst of us. We have got to get back to the time when we put the needs of others ahead of ourselves. We need leadership, selflessness and humility as well.”

During the eulogy, President Obama reflected on the private moment he shared with Lewis on Zoom about the protests taking place today.

“I told him, all those young people, John — of every race and every religion, from every background and gender and sexual orientation — John, those are your children. They learned from your example, even if they didn’t always know it.”

President Obama went onto say later in his message, “By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, Black and white… have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

Sixty years after he taught Lewis and a group of bright-eyed students, Lawson, his hair white and his body yielding to time, closed his address at the funeral with a poem from Langston Hughes that he said represented the spirit of John Lewis:

I dream a world where man

No other man will scorn,

Where love will bless the earth

And peace its paths adorn

I dream a world where all

Will know sweet freedom's way,

Where greed no longer saps the soul

Nor avarice blights our day.

A world I dream where black or white,

Whatever race you be,

Will share the bounties of the earth

And every man is free,

Where wretchedness will hang its head

And joy, like a pearl,

Attends the needs of all mankind-

Of such I dream, my world!

Senior contributor Hamil Harris is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland College Park and has been a lecturer at Morgan State University. Harris is minister at the Glenarden Church of Christ and a police chaplain. A longtime reporter at The Washington Post, Harris was on the team of Post reporters that published the series “Being a Black Man.” He also was the reporter on the video project that accompanied the series that won two Emmy Awards, the Casey Medal and the Peabody Award. In addition to writing for ReligionUnplugged, Harris contributes to outlets such as The Washington Post, USA Today, The Christian Chronicle and the Washington Informer.