May 1, 2024
Historian Greenberg (Rutgers Univ.; Nixon's Shadow) writes about the late civil rights leader and congressman, drawing on extensive interviews with Lewis and hundreds of others, a dozen archives, media footage, and even FBI documents. Greenberg traces Lewis's life from childhood through his iconic contributions to U.S. politics. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from September 1, 2024
This massive, heavily detailed biography of iconic civil rights hero John Lewis portrays him as a man of strong principles. Uncompromising in his commitment to nonviolence--which he saw as a Christian, morally based way of life rather than a mere tactic--he faced down the worst that segregationist America had to throw at him with the quiet courage of "soul force." Verging on hagiography, Greenberg chronicles how Lewis, a national leader in his early twenties, led student sit-ins for integration in Nashville, Freedom Rides in Alabama, and voter registration drives across the South. The youngest organizer and speaker at the "I Have a Dream" March on Washington, Lewis collaborated, and often clashed with, the titans of the Black Freedom Struggle, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Diane Nash, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, and Stokely Carmichael. As the "conscience of Congress," he was committed to nonviolence, yet opposed to defunding the police; he stood up for immigrants and the LGBTQ community (a courageous stance for a Black minister). Throughout the harsh Trump-era backlash against voting rights, Lewis remained hopeful, firmly convinced that love was the only way to achieve the "beloved community." Greenberg captures Lewis' life, achievements, and times with heart-stopping precision.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Greenberg's foundational Lewis biography, a passionately researched and defining portrait of an American hero, will receive avid attention.
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Starred review from September 1, 2024
Comprehensive biography of the late civil rights leader and legislator. John Lewis practically emerged from the womb with his habits fully formed: at a very early age, he became entranced by books, taking as a lifelong talisman the poem "Invictus" and its closing: "I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul." Born in 1940 to tenant farmers in southeastern Alabama, Lewis came of age as the Civil Rights Movement was gathering force; while a student at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, he helped organize lunch-counter sit-ins and even tried to organize an NAACP chapter on campus until warned that the white churches funding the college "would never tolerate it." Organizing voter drives during Freedom Summer 1964, Lewis practiced Martin Luther King Jr.'s doctrine of nonviolence, which he held to for the rest of his life, even as he endured beatings by white supremacists and police. He made news for refusing to give in and later, having taken the case for civil rights to first John and then Robert Kennedy, for entering national legislative politics. Greenberg allows that Lewis could be a contrarian with a radical edge; he stated at the March on Washington, for example, "We are involved in a serious social revolution." He remained a force for progressivism in Congress--and, Greenberg notes, an early and strong ally of the LGBTQ+ community and advocate for the environment. Greenberg also points to uncomfortable moments, including Lewis' divisive primary race against fellow Black progressive Julian Bond, whose enmity extended unto death (Lewis was not invited to Bond's funeral). Greenberg also writes perceptively about how Lewis finessed his friendship with Hillary Clinton to become a champion of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential race and how Lewis became a leader in the repudiation of Trump-era white supremacism before his death in 2020. An exemplary life, and an exemplary biography that will rekindle readers' commitment to racial justice.
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November 18, 2024
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.