ANNOUNCER JAMIE RICHARDSON: The JFK35 podcast is made possible through generous support from the Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation.
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ANDREW YOUNG: Nobody could match John Lewis' courage. That when it came to walking into the fiery furnace, marching through the valley of the shadow of death, John didn't think twice about it.
HOST MATT PORTER: John Lewis was just 21 years old at the height of the civil rights movement. He would go on to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, galvanizing hundreds of students in bus boycotts and peaceful protests across the South. In today's episode, we'll examine the legacy of courage Lewis leaves behind with the co-author of Lewis's final book, Carry On, and Lewis's friend and fellow civil rights activist Ambassador Andrew Young, next on JFK35.
JOHN KENNEDY: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
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MATT PORTER: Hello. I'm Matt Porter. Welcome to JFK35. Representative John Lewis loomed large over the American civil rights movement for 60 years before he died of cancer in 2020. Lewis marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He continued marching throughout his life, including last year at Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, DC, after the murder of George Floyd.
In the early 1960s, Lewis was considered one of the Big Six civil rights organizers as leader of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Before the March on Washington, Lewis met both Robert F. Kennedy and President Kennedy at the White House with Dr. King and other civil rights leaders at the time. The photos from that meeting are available in our digital archives.
We also have a 2004 oral history interview with historian Vicki Daitch and John Lewis. In this clip from the meeting, you'll hear Lewis remembering meeting the president in the Oval Office to discuss the upcoming March on Washington.
JOHN LEWIS: And I was not disappointed when we met with him. It was in this meeting-- and I remember very well in a discussion about civil rights and what was happening-- and somehow, out of the blue, A. Philip Randolph says something like, Mr. President, the Black masses are restless, in his baritone voice. The Black masses are restless, and we're going to march on Washington.
I hadn't heard anything about the possibility of a march on Washington before. Maybe some of the other participants and leaders had heard it. And you can tell by the body language of President Kennedy, he just sort of moved and twisted and turned in his chair. He didn't necessarily like what he heard.
And he said, Mr. Randolph, if you bring a lot of people to Washington, won't there be a crisis, disorder, chaos? And we would never be able to get a civil rights bill through the Congress. And Mr. Randolph responded and said, Mr. President, this would be an orderly, peaceful, nonviolent protest. And President Kennedy sort of said, well, I think we're going to have problems. But we all have problems, and we can solve those problems.
And we came out on the lawn of the White House. And we announced to the media that we had a wonderful, meaningful, productive meeting with President Kennedy, and we told him we were going to have a march on Washington and that, as a group, we would be meeting a few days to issue the call for the March on Washington.
And I believe on July 2, 1963, in New York City, the group did. The six of us met. And we issued the call for the March on Washington and invited five-- four major white religious and labor leaders to join us in issuing the call for the March on Washington.
VICKI DAITCH: Well, at the meeting at the White House, President Kennedy was-- "supportive" might be too strong of a word, but he agreed that it would be OK to have this March on Washington?
JOHN LEWIS: I think he preferred us not to bring a large crowd to Washington. But when he saw that we were going-- probably going to have it, he sort of sent a-- let it be known that he wanted to do everything possible for it to be orderly, peaceful, and successful.
MATT PORTER: Now that we've heard from John Lewis himself, I'd like to bring in my two guests to talk about his legacy. Ambassador Andrew Young worked alongside John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s. As the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he helped negotiate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1972, he became the first African American elected to Congress in the Deep South since Reconstruction. He was also the first African-American ambassador to the United Nations under President Carter. He would then take over as the second Black mayor of Atlanta since 1849.
Joining Ambassador Young is Kabir Sehgal. Kabir is a multi-Grammy and Latin Grammy award winner. He is a US Navy veteran and a best-selling author with 16 books on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling lists. Today he joins us to talk about a new book, Carry On, which he cowrote with representative John Lewis. Ambassador Andrew Young and Kabir Sehgal, thank you both for joining me today.
KABIR SEHGAL: Great to be here.
ANDREW YOUNG: My pleasure.
MATT PORTER: Before we get into the book, both of you knew Congressman John Lewis for a long time. Can each of you describe how you first met Representative Lewis? And what struck you about him as you got to know him?
ANDREW YOUNG: Well, I first met John Lewis on the Fisk University campus about 1960, toward the end of 1960. And I really didn't meet him. I just saw him. And the thing was I was down there doing Bible study at a church conference. And I was on the Fisk University campus. And most of the campus was busy in fraternity initiations. And so they were all costumed up and acting the fool.
And then there was this one little group of students, just about 10 of them, that were going in completely the opposite direction. Everybody else was coming to the center of the campus. They were going off campus.
And I said, who is that? Where are they going? And they said, that's John Lewis. He's going to test some more restaurants. He was continuing the student sit-in movement that occurred earlier. He followed up on just about every restaurant to make sure that they were agreeing, desegregate the lunch counters.
And I was just impressed that they probably had 200 or 300 students in various kinds of fraternity foolery. Hm. And he and a small group were going in the opposite direction, testing restaurants to their willingness to end segregation. It was unusual.
Because when I was in college, I was probably not like John Lewis. I was probably more like the fraternity folk. And so it impressed me that he was seemingly younger, much more serious, and was rather single-minded in his pursuit of justice and equality as far as lunch counters in Nashville were concerned.
MATT PORTER: Kabir, you got to meet John Lewis a lot later in life. What was your first meeting like with Representative Lewis? And what struck you as you got to know him?
KABIR SEHGAL: I think I met him in the late 1980s. He came to my father's office to talk about-- I think he was trying to raise money for his political campaigns. So I met him much, much later, obviously, but through the business, political circles in Atlanta.
Georgia Democratic politics weren't so big, I don't think, back in the day. A lot of folks knew each other. And I just kind of got to know him over the years and ran into him at different mostly political events, fundraisers. And we had a sort of sustained conversation throughout the years.
And we talked after he received his diagnosis. We spoke by phone, and he was keen to collaborate on a book of his reflections. He didn't have to say it was his final reflections. I think we all kind of knew. And it was great working with him to memorialize his thoughts and wisdom for future generations.
MATT PORTER: And what was that like? Like you said, no one maybe talked about it, but it was likely going to be his last chance to write his thoughts in a book like this. What was the message he wanted to send, from your perspective working on it with him?
KABIR SEHGAL: I think the last public photo of John Lewis is him in Washington, DC, at the Black Lives Matter Plaza. And yeah, exactly, he had his hands up, crossed. And I think he wanted to be in some ways-- you know that Mark Twain quote, "History doesn't repeat. It rhymes?" He wanted people to see that on the front lines of the Black Lives movement-- Black Lives Matter movement, there's a link that goes from the civil rights movement through to this current movement. And I think he wanted to be associated with it.
But he also wanted to remember-- or remind people of the values of nonviolence and the principles that animated the civil rights leaders. So I think this book, Carry On, is very much obviously a book of inspirational pearls of wisdom that he wanted to share. But I also think, carry on. Don't lose hope. It may seem dire. It may seem dramatic at times. But stick to nonviolence. Take the high ground because things will get-- there's higher ground and better days ahead. So this is really a book of hope that I hope people will check out.
ANDREW YOUNG: There's a Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. And he wrote a book that I think sums up John Lewis's life, the title does, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. And I think that John Lewis was single-minded, pure in heart. He focused his life on ending segregation in any way, shape, or form that he could. And I don't think he ever veered from that.
MATT PORTER: I remember reading that intro, your introduction, Ambassador Young. And I think you also said, the book is called Carry On, but you mentioned it could be called "Humility" when referring to Congressman Lewis. And why'd you say that?
ANDREW YOUNG: Because John was genuinely humble. He had almost no ego. And one of the things that I was curious about-- because I didn't know him well. But I knew that there were a hundred students from various college campuses across the country that would have wanted to be the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
All of them had credentials. All of them were brilliant orators. All of them were great personalities. I mean, they were just an exceptional group of kids-- when I say "kids," 19 and 20, 18 through 21 maybe.
But when they got to Johnson C. Smith for the convention that was to elect the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, they elected John Lewis. And when I asked some of the people, why was John Lewis elected when you had so many others who were competitive in various ways, and they said that nobody could match John Lewis' courage. That when it came to walking into the fiery furnace, marching through the valley of the shadow of death, John didn't think twice about it. And he had been in every rough-and-tumble demonstration that had taken place, practically, between 1960s sit-ins and the bridge over the Selma river, the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.
MATT PORTER: Something that's particularly close to us is that era, here at the JFK Library, in the 1960s. Ambassador Young, if you want to tell us a little more about what that was like and what made John Lewis sort of special for that moment, particularly thinking about all the younger folks who don't have any link to that era.
ANDREW YOUNG: Well, I think that John Lewis was linked to the action. He wasn't just prominent on a college campus. He was prominent in the sit-ins, and he was prominent again in the Freedom Rides.
And both of these were really-- in fact, there was a movie done on the Nashville sit-in story that featured him. And the thing is, it doesn't feature him making a speech. It doesn't feature him being a rabble-rouser. It features him as a calm, solid, almost innocent young man walking through the valley of the shadow of death and fearing no evil.
MATT PORTER: Really interesting. And you wonder what influenced Congressman Lewis. So, Kabir, to you, there are two chapters, one on mentors, which he talks about Dr. Martin Luther King, and one on heroes where he talks about Mahatma Gandhi. How did those two great men influence John Lewis and the leader he would become?
KABIR SEHGAL: There's a reverence for Mahatma Gandhi. The nonviolent philosophy can be traced to Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, the New Testament. So there is a strong and long intellectual framework for nonviolence. I remember Dr. King, when he went to India, he said, he didn't go to India as a tourist but went as a pilgrim. And there's long been an affinity and connection between the nonviolence movement in India and what happened in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
When Gandhi was leading his protest against the British, he was marching hundreds of miles to the sea to make salt in protest of the salt laws, the bans to make salt by the British. And it was very violent. But they didn't fight back, and that obviously dramatized what was happening in India. And it captured the world's attention, that of the inhumane actions by the British.
And I like to call Ambassador Young, who's-- Ambassador Young is a great filmmaker and a great storyteller. He's made many films. And I think a lot of the leaders of the civil rights movement understood drama, in a way, when to do the marches, how to do the marches, how to dramatize action. So I think there was the intellectual framing and also the storytelling that Gandhi portrayed in his march towards a free India. That's the Indian portion. Maybe Ambassador Young can share more on this.
MATT PORTER: Yeah, Ambassador Young, do you want to talk about mentors for John Lewis?
ANDREW YOUNG: John Lewis was, I think, 14 or 15 when the Montgomery bus boycott started. And he was in a little country town right near there, Troy, Georgia-- I mean, Troy, Alabama. And he had been denied a library card. He had been denied entrance into Troy College-- Community College. And he wrote Martin Luther King a letter. And Martin sent him a bus ticket to come to visit him in Montgomery.
And I think that that began a friendship. Both of them were very young. John was 20-- was 15. And Martin was just 25 or 26. They could have been brothers. They were very much the same size. They both wanted to be preachers. And I think that they impressed each other, and that became a lifelong friendship between the two of them.
MATT PORTER: This can go to either of you. But we talk about John Lewis's great mentors. But Lewis himself was a mentor and hero for many in today's social justice movement. I think, in a way, we're lucky to have him serve in Congress and lead such a long life. Either of you can pick this up or both of you. How do you think the influence of John will influence the next generation?
ANDREW YOUNG: I think that John Lewis is going to be one of the first people that pop up no matter what you look up. If you look up the sit-ins, if you look up the Freedom Rides, if you look up Selma, if you look up the war in Vietnam, you can always run into John Lewis because he was consistently in the forefront of the nonviolent movement during all of this period from roughly 1955, '60, right straight on through till 2020.
MATT PORTER: And, Kabir, do you want to pick up on that? What do you think John Lewis's influence will be for the younger generation?
KABIR SEHGAL: Well, I grew up in Atlanta. And I thought of John Lewis as a-- our local congressman and in the '90s. And I think I was delighted and surprised to see the world kind of renotice him in the 2000s. And he was always a legend, but he became sort of this legend and myth. And I think he's going to inspire people for generations to come. It's through his book, Carry On. It's through the movies that are made on him and through his speeches.
I think he's going to be seen as almost like an American Mandela, that whenever we're struggling, whenever we're going through a difficult time-- look what's happening to voting rights in state legislatures across the country-- we can revisit the words of John Lewis as a compass to point us in the true direction.
So I hope that young people write books about him, study him, make songs about him, or make movies about him to keep on telling a story. Almost like a George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, we need to keep telling a story so that we remember-- it's through remembering him we learn about the values that are-- that make us more of a perfect nation. So that's what I hope his legacy will be.
And I hope that nonviolence is part of that as people remember, it's easy to get angry, but how do you hold those emotions in check? It's difficult to do. So those are a couple precepts that I hope we live by in the coming-- in the years ahead.
MATT PORTER: Well, thank you both for that. And I think this is a question also to you both. The two words that are often most connected with John is the phrase "good trouble." How would each of you both describe what that notion of good trouble means and what it meant for Congressman Lewis?
ANDREW YOUNG: Well, I think with John it was something that really came from his childhood. It was his childish way of saying that when his parents wanted him not to get in any trouble, to stay in his place, not to rock the boat, not to challenge segregation, he considered that trouble, yes. But he made a distinction between bad trouble and good trouble. Good trouble was when you challenge the evil of your society.
KABIR SEHGAL: Yeah, and it's what Thoreau talked about. It's about, again, the drama. I remember Ambassador Young saying they staged a lot of these protests so that it would happen during the evening news block and so people would be paying attention. And I think good trouble is civil disobedience. It's taking a knee in a bank. It's protesting at the lunch counter. It's what Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks did in Montgomery.
So I think it's drawing attention to what's unjust but not in a violent way, which takes a lot of thought, and it takes a lot of restraint. But ultimately, you have to have hope that-- I mean, you have to have hope that the world will change. And that's what Carry On is about. In the book, Congressman Lewis talks about the time he was beaten up in South Carolina. He was one of the original Freedom Fighters. And years later, and I think in the early 2000s, he was contacted by someone who had beat him up. He said, I want to come and make amends for what I did to you in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
So they met. And John Lewis-- ultimately, this man, the assailant, asked for forgiveness. John Lewis obviously forgave him. And he said, you know, people don't grow they-- people don't change. They grow. And it took this man 30, 40 years, 50 years, but he realized that he was wrong. And that's a microcosm of what happened in society is that if you keep on-- if you keep focused and eyes on the prize, people change, societies change, and the system changes.
MATT PORTER: Ambassador Young, you wrote in your introduction, which was a really great introduction to this book, about how this country today has been exposed by two plagues, the first COVID-19 and the second being the plague of social injustice rising up again. How can this book Carry On, do you think, serve as inspiration for those fighting the good fights, getting into good trouble as both of these plagues sort of still exist concurrently in our country?
ANDREW YOUNG: Well, there's a hymn that Martin Luther King used to quote, "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. But that scaffold sways the future, for behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadows keeping watch above his own." And I think that it was quite unusual. In fact, it could have meant his death, even in Troy, Alabama, for challenging the library, wanting to get into Troy College, Troy University, that this was not play stuff.
And I think a part of what we began to see, I mean, that with John marching-- and even in Selma, it looks like a big line, but it's only a couple hundred people. And in Nashville, it was a small group. In the Freedom Rides, it was just the passengers on a bus against a mob of tens of thousands-- that there is a difference in the kind of risk and the kind of struggle you're willing to take on. And John didn't calculate his risk. He basically decided he was going to do what was right.
MATT PORTER: And, Kabir, to build off of that, as we-- I think we mentioned right at the beginning of this interview that photo of Congressman Lewis on Black Lives Matter Boulevard in DC after the death of George Floyd and all of those protests. We saw the surge in activism. In the time you spent with him, how did Congressman Lewis feel about the future of these activism and social justice movements before he died? What did he hope for the future? Was he optimistic?
KABIR SEHGAL: He was optimistic. His last kind of final words in this book are really, "Don't lose hope." And he was inspired by the-- obviously, he was inspired by the actions of the protesters, that people were mobilizing. I think he would have been very happy that the mobilization that happened in June 2020 sort of catalyzed, I think, voter outreach and turnout, which ultimately led to not only winning the White House but winning the two Senate seats here in Georgia.
His pastor and his intern, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, became Georgia senators. And I'm sure he would have been very delighted to have seen. And they were campaigning for issues of social justice and change and voting reform. So the fight continues.
And I think the most-- in the book, Carry On, he is very explanatory about voting. He says, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote. Write it all over the page. Put it in caps lock, in capitalized letters. And he would have been delighted to see the success of the outreach in Georgia. And he would have been dismayed at what's happening again in the state legislatures and would have been probably advocating for the bill that's named after him, the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill. So the work continues. It always does. And he would be probably on the front lines advocating for voting rights today.
MATT PORTER: Before we go, I just have a couple more questions. And this one is for you, Kabir. Most of Carry On focuses on political or social justice issues. But there were several chapters that were a bit more personal on details from friendship to marriage to sports. Curious, what was one of your favorite chapters that didn't deal directly with politics? And why did you think-- why would John think it was important to talk not just about the meat and potatoes of politics but these other issues?
KABIR SEHGAL: Yeah, we wanted this to capture John Lewis the man. I mean, he has written books on the civil rights movement. He's written books on his philosophy of nonviolence. But this book was really about pearls of wisdom, like a Tuesdays With Morrie about life.
And it was about him drinking milkshakes. He loved vanilla and strawberry milkshakes. One of his favorite hobbies was going down to the local antique shops and buying antiques. He was an avid book collector. He loved paintings and photography. So he enjoyed sports, and he always was very proud about the Falcons when they did well and the Braves and the Atlanta United. So he lived with cats. He talks about his relationship with his cats.
So we wanted to capture these sort of gems that you won't find elsewhere in the John Lewis literature, if you will. So it's not just "Good Trouble" on a bumper sticker. It's this man who is very human and had vulnerabilities and frailties and spoke in a very soft tone when it came to this book. And we're so glad that he gave us these final pages that we can revisit forever. And that's what Carry On is all about.
MATT PORTER: And then my final question, which goes to both of you, as you mentioned, John Lewis is already potentially being memorialized in, hopefully, that new Voting Rights Act that's on the table and also, like Kabir as you said, the two new senators from Georgia, John Lewis's home state. So that will always be something that was part of his work. What do both of you hope that people will remember most about Congressman John Lewis going forward?
ANDREW YOUNG: I think that this courage-- Maya Angelou said, "Courage is the most important virtue. For without it, none of the other virtues become relevant." John Lewis was a courageous young man all his life.
KABIR SEHGAL: Yeah, I would say patience, perseverance. He sort of remained almost to the point of being dogmatic. He had a perseverance towards his cause, whether that was legislation or voting rights or whatever it was. He just would not take his eyes off the prize. And that doggedness is something, I think-- with his principle, doggedness is something that we should all admire in him.
MATT PORTER: I want to thank you both. And thank you, Ambassador Young, for mentioning courage. We're no stranger to the meaning of courage here at the JFK Library. In fact, Congressman was honored for his courage with the Profile in Courage Award here in Boston. So we're all happy that you could be here, that you were able put this book together, and we have these great reflections. Ambassador Young, thank you so much for joining us. Kabir--
ANDREW YOUNG: Thank you.
MATT PORTER: --thank you very much.
KABIR SEHGAL: Thanks so much. You take care.
MATT PORTER: OK.
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John Lewis is the only person to receive a Profile in Courage Award not for a single act of courage but instead a life filled with courageous acts. It seems only fitting to leave you then with Lewis reflecting on courage in a clip from his speech accepting the award in 2001 at the JFK Library.
JOHN LEWIS: On this very day, May 21, 1961, exactly 40 years ago, the Freedom Riders were trapped in the sanctuary of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. The day before, we have been surrounded by a sea of people at the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, a mob shouting and screaming, men swinging fists, baseball bats, lead pipes, and others throwing stones, women swinging heavy purses, little children clawing with their fingernails at the face of anyone they could reach.
It was madness. It was unbelievable. We thought we were going to die. Somehow in my youth, I remember, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."
Tonight at the First Baptist Church, exactly 40 years ago today, was a long, very long night. If we continued the Freedom Ride, we would face arrest or worse. And if we stopped the Rides, freedom would be denied. An angry mob surrounded the church, throwing stones and firebombs, overturning cars, even pounding on the walls of the sanctuary while we prayed and sang hymns of the church and freedom songs.
President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General Robert Kennedy, desperately negotiated with the governor of Alabama for our safety. It was our weeping and the nation's weeping for that night. And for many more nights to come, the American people, indeed the world, would witness many more beatings, jailing, and even to killing a nonviolent protester daring to build a better America.
So May 21, 1961, I remembered, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning." By that morning, joy had come to us. President Kennedy made a bold and courageous decision to federalize the Alabama National Guard. He also sent in federal marshals to protect us. We would make it to Jackson, Mississippi, and be arrested. But we could not have made that trip if it had not been for President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy.
Until joy came in that morning after the long, dark weeping of her soul, America could not be America. The joy of morning comes not only by will but by what I call "the spirit of history." It sweep us up and commands us to answer hate and fear with love and courage.
Courage is a reflection of the heart. It is a reflection of something deep within the man or woman or even a child who must resist and must defy an authority that is morally wrong. Courage makes us march on despite fear and doubt towards the road to justice and fairness. Courage is not necessarily heroic but as necessary as birds need wings to fly. Courage is not rooted in reason. But rather, courage comes from a divine purpose to make things right.
People will often ask me and some of my colleagues in the Congress ask me, how did others and I continue our nonviolent protest through the '60s with the likelihood that we would be beaten, imprisoned, or even killed? President Kennedy is my best answer to this question. In 1963, he said, "The question of race, the moral issue is as old as the scripture itself."
When you stand up to injustice, when you refuse to let brute force pressure you, when you love the man who spits on you, or call you names, or put lighted cigarettes out in your hair or down your backs, you come to believe that righteousness will always prevail. Just hold on. Keep the faith.
We, and I mean countless and thousand, even millions of Americans, changed old wine into new. We tore down the walls of racial division. We inspired a generation of creative, nonviolent protests. And we are still today building a new America, a beloved America, a community at peace with itself in beloved Boston, beloved Cincinnati, beloved Washington, beloved Atlanta, in every beloved city, town, village, and hamlet in our nation and in the world. Yes, our world can become a beloved world, a world not divided but a world united.
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