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John Lewis longs for the passion of 1963
From Jonathan Karl
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- John Lewis, now a Georgia congressman, recently walked the National Mall in Washington to recall what happened here 40 years ago. "It was unreal, it was like a call had gone out, like the trumpet had sounded, 'Come to Washington. We're marching on Washington,' " Lewis said. On August 28, 1963, Lewis was 23 and a student activist. He was the youngest civil rights leader to speak at the March on Washington and today he is the only speaker still alive. "It was a sea of people, bodies, people standing together, so orderly, so quiet, most of the people sort of dressed up like they were going to a church meeting," he said, strolling down the path he had once marched. "People don't demonstrate like this anymore." Lewis remembered the moment Martin Luther King Jr. took the podium to give what would become one of the most important speeches in American history. "At that particular time, on that day, I had no idea that this speech -- that the words would be so meaningful, so significant," Lewis said. Lewis preceded King to the podium at the Lincoln Memorial. As president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his speech would be the most radical of the day. "We came with a different philosophy, we came with different attitude," he said. "We were a little impatient. We had a degree of militancy." The original text of Lewis' speech promised a "scorched earth policy" to march through the South the way Sherman did, burning Jim Crow to the ground. Lewis pointed out that the speech called for only nonviolent actions. But, the words were too militant. March organizers wanted them out. A. Philip Randolph, founding president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and an icon of the early civil rights movement, had called for the march and inspired other leaders to join him in seeking freedoms and jobs. Randolph and King both thought Lewis would strike the wrong tone with his speech. "Right behind [Abraham] Lincoln here," Lewis said, "we were sitting on the side making the changes, and Mr. Randolph said, 'John we've come this far together, for the sake of unity, can we make these changes?' And Dr. King said, 'John, that doesn't sound like you. Can we make those changes?' I made the changes." Even with the changes, the speech was still the most radical of the day. "We are tired of being beaten by policemen," Lewis told the crowd in 1963. "We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler 'be patient.' How long can we be patient? We want our freedom and we want it now." Fresh on everyone's mind, at the march and around the country, was the scene in Birmingham, Alabama, just that May when police chief Bull Connor ordered dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful demonstrators and had hundreds arrested. Only two years before, in 1961, Lewis was among 13 volunteers to participate in the first Freedom Ride, organized to challenge segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis was beaten severely numerous times for participating in the Freedom Rides. He was hit with a wooden crate in Birmingham and left unconscious in a Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, Alabama. After the march, Lewis and the other civil rights leaders met with President John F. Kennedy. But Kennedy had opposed the march, fearing it would provoke a backlash. "President Kennedy thought with a march there would be chaos, possibility of violence, that it would turn the Congress against passage of a civil rights bill." Kennedy was assassinated November 22, 1963. The Civil Rights Act was adopted in 1964 and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The leaders of the march credit the event with raising enough awareness to pass the bill. Forty years later, Lewis looks back at the march with a mix of longing and nostalgia. "I long for that sense of passion, I long for that sense of movement, that sense of not being still and I think 40 years later, we're too quiet, we're too patient, too complacent," Lewis said. "Somehow we need to find that sense of passion in the same spirit that descended on us 40 years ago. It needs to descend on American people again."
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