Congress’s leading champion of civil rights warned President Trump on Thursday that the use of military force to quash protests demanding racial justice would be both misguided and futile.
Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), an early and enduring advocate for nonviolent protest, told CBS News that he and other civil rights demonstrators of the 1960s had faced savage beatings at the hands of militarized law enforcers. It didn’t stop them then, he said, and it won’t stop those who are now demonstrating across the country to protest the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of Minneapolis police.
“I think it would be a serious mistake on the part of President Trump to use the military to stop orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protests,” Lewis said in an interview with “CBS This Morning.”
“You cannot stop the call of history,” he continued. “You may use troopers, you may use firehoses and water, but it cannot be stopped. There cannot be any turning back. We’ve come too far, made too much progress, to stop now or to go back. The world is seeing what is happening, and we are ready to continue to move forward.”
Lewis has plenty of experience on which to draw.
He was among the Freedom Riders, who in 1961 rode buses defiantly through the Jim Crow South to protest racial segregation. In 1963, at the age of 23, he was the youngest person to speak during the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Two years later, in another milestone event of the civil rights era, Lewis joined hundreds of activists for a march in Alabama to protest black inequality at the polls. It was intended to go from Selma to Montgomery; they didn’t get nearly so far. On the other side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they were met by police officers and vigilantes with sticks and billy clubs. Lewis was beaten nearly to death.
Dubbed “Bloody Sunday,” the march catalyzed the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act shortly afterward.
Lewis said Thursday that, 55 years later, he still believes in peaceful protest as the most effective device for bringing about social change — something he calls “getting into good trouble.”
“The way of love is a much better way. And that’s what we did,” he said. “We were arrested, we were jailed, we were beaten. But we didn’t hate. And we helped change America.”
Lewis’s voice carries a special resonance in the midst of the massive protests over the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man killed in the custody of the Minneapolis police last week. A video taken by a bystander shows Floyd pleading for his life while an officer pins his head to the street with a knee on his neck for almost nine minutes.
The outrage in Minneapolis spread quickly to cities across the country, and later the globe, where demonstrators have marched to demand an end to police brutality and the culture of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. While an overwhelming majority of the protests have been peaceful, they’ve been marred by isolated incidents of violence, arson and looting, leading critics to hammer the entire movement as a threat to the nation’s civic order.
Trump is among those critics, and on Monday he blasted the nation’s governors for letting “anarchists” take over the country’s streets then threatened to deploy military forces in spots of continued unrest — a step rejected by the head of the Pentagon on Wednesday.
Shortly afterward, the president directed federal law enforcers to remove protesters from an area just across the street from the White House so he could have his picture taken in front of a historic church, which had been the target of arson the night before. The law enforcers did so by attacking peaceful protesters and journalists with flash grenades, chemical agents and shields.
Lewis is cheering the protesters for their persistence and resolve, saying the global outcry has dwarfed even the huge demonstrations of the 1960s.
“It is so much more massive and all-inclusive,” he told CBS. “People now understand what the struggle was all about. It’s another step down a very, very long road toward freedom, justice, for all human kind.”
Lewis’s CBS interview marked his first public appearance since Floyd’s death. The 17-term Georgia congressman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year and is receiving ongoing treatment in Washington. The slimmer-looking Lewis said he needs to put on some pounds, but otherwise his health “is improving.”
“I’m trying to eat more,” he said, “and regain my weight.”