7 August 2002 JOHN LEWIS: FROM FREEDOM RIDER TO CONGRESSMAN by Christine M. Hill, Enslow Publishers, July 2002, 128 p., b/w photos, timeline

"On February 18, a young African-American army veteran, Jimmie Lee Jackson, was shot at a voter registration rally in nearby Marion, Alabama. He died a few days later. SCLC [The Southern Christian Leadership Conference] announced a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, fifty-four miles away, to protest Jackson's murder.

"On Sunday, March 7 [1965], late in the afternoon, John Lewis and SCLC's Hosea Williams led nearly six hundred marchers from the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which leads out of Selma toward Montgomery. They could not see over the steep span until they reached the middle of the bridge. There on the other side was 'a sea of blue,' Lewis remembered: 'Alabama state troopers.' Behind them were row upon row of white civilians deputized that morning by Sheriff Clark, many of them on horseback. Lewis looked down to the muddy water one hundred feet below. 'Can you swim?' Hosea Williams asked him.

" 'No,' Lewis answered. Neither could Williams."

Lewis and Williams then knelt to pray and passed the word back for all the marchers to do the same. As history recorded--both in words and in famous, stomach-churning photos--the troopers attacked the marchers, fracturing Lewis' skull with a billy club. Two weeks later, after a federal judge had ruled that the march could proceed, a line of marchers that swelled to twenty-five thousand people made that journey to Montgomery.

As a child on Long Island, I watched the television reports and read the magazine articles about the march. The bravery of the marchers and the media's coverage of those atrocities performed by the troopers under the direction of their boss, Governor George Wallace, turned the tide of national opinion--the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law a few months later.

That young black man with the fractured skull, a disciple of Gandhi and King, had already been putting his body on the line for years prior to that Bloody Sunday thirty-seven years ago. Estranged from his family for his involvement in the Civil Rights movement, arrested more than forty times in his determination to change the way African Americans were treated in America, John Lewis eventually became US Congressman John Lewis, currently serving an Atlanta-centered district in his eighth term. Lewis has served most of those years as a deputy whip in the Democratic caucus.

In a solid, clearly-written biography for middle grade students, Christine M. Hill presents the story of this lesser-known American hero. The author relies heavily on Lewis' own autobiography (WALKING WITH THE WIND, Simon & Schuster, 1998) as well as articles by and about him. We follow Lewis' life, starting with his childhood as an Alabama sharecropper's son, his preaching his first sermon at sixteen, and his training to sit on the bus as a Freedom Rider--where he would be severely beaten for the first of many times:

"On the night before the trip started, John Lewis dined out for the first time. Growing up in Alabama and going to school in Nashville, he had never eaten in an elegant restaurant. He had never sat with blacks and whites together, conversing pleasantly over dinner. He savored the unfamiliar, but delicious Chinese food. He admired the handsome, silvery serving platters. But none of the volunteers could forget the next day's purpose. 'It was like the Last Supper,' Lewis said, 'because you didn't know what to expect, going on the Freedom Ride.' "

That ride has taken John Lewis a long distance--from a segregated school all the way to his present job as the country's highest ranking elected African American. JOHN LEWIS: FROM FREEDOM RIDER TO CONGRESSMAN is an excellent, and in-depth introduction to one of my own living heroes.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com