Part 3: “It Came To That”: Civil Rights Activists John Lewis And Thurgood Marshall

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Rosa Parks and the Greensboro Four fueled the rise of John Lewis, a skinny student studying at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. Lewis became a 1961 Freedom Rider. This means Lewis, a largely unknown seminarian, fought against segregation by joining the Freedom Riders, who changed history to the point that about five museums chronicle their achievements.

Freedom Riders confronted southern segregated interstate bus terminals, which had already been outlawed by the Supreme Court.

Describing the Freedom Riders on its website, the Alabama Historical Mission said, “Black and white, male and female, none of them older than 22, stepped off a bus at the Montgomery Greyhound Station on May 20, 1961. They were prepared to meet mob violence with non-violence and courage. They prepared farewell letters and wills. Their goal was to help end racial segregation in public transportation. And they did.”

No one knows exactly when Lewis decided he’d had enough of harsh Jim Crow laws. But Lewis was beaten and arrested more than 45 times on charges like disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

“If you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something about it,” Lewis once said. “You cannot be afraid to speak up and speak out for what you believe. You have to have courage, raw courage.”

Historians show Lewis had raw courage. During the 1963 “Bloody Sunday” Selma to Montgomery March, Lewis suffered a fractured skull from a clubbing. He said he thought he was going to die. Alabama state troopers brutally beat Lewis and hundreds of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. When the marchers stopped to pray, the state troopers hurled tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with nightsticks. According to LIFE magazine, white onlookers cheered them on as “dazed and wounded Negroes helplessly awaited aid.”

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Eight days later, President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress.

“It is wrong – deadly wrong – to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country,” Johnson said. On Aug. 6, 1965, a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the Voting Rights Act became law. It quickly became known as the most important piece of civil rights legislation and one of the most consequential laws ever passed by Congress. The law led to the abolition of literacy tests and poll taxes; made possible the registration of millions of minority voters and replaced segregationist registrars with federal examiners.

By 1963, Lewis was recognized as one of the “Big Six” leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, along with Dr. King, Whitney Young, A. Phillip Randolph, James Farmer and Roy Wilkins. He was one of the planners and keynote speakers of the March on Washington in August 1963, where Dr. King delivered his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech.

In 1981, Lewis was elected to Atlanta City Council. In 1986, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. In February 2010, President Barack Obama awarded Lewis the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

In July 2020, Lewis’ flag-draped coffin rested on the marble tiles at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C., after he died of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Lewis once said, “I met Rosa Parks when I was 17. I met Dr. [Martin Luther] King when I was 18.

These two individuals inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get in trouble. So I got in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

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Rosa Parks’, the Greensboro Four’s, and John Lewis’ well-known civil rights protests came on the heels of another great man who acted to redress the discriminatory conditions of Black Americans.

As early as 1940, Attorney Thurgood Marshall, who in 1967 would become the nation’s first Black Supreme Court Justice decided “it came to that” when he filed a landmark lawsuit and won a Supreme Court victory in Chambers v. Florida.

Marshall, an unknown lawyer at the time, protested the coerced confession of a young African American man, accused of murder. Marshall said it violated the defendant’s constitutional rights.

Marshall told the Supreme Court that police officers interrogated his Black male client for “several days and all night before the confessions were secured.” Guess what happened? Marshall won that landmark lawsuit, changed history, and paved the way for Rosa Parks and the Greensboro Four.

Marshall, who is especially known for his legal prowess in the landmark Brown vs. The Board of Education Supreme Court victory that ended “separate but equal” schools, was appointed in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Supreme Court.

By the time he retired from the Supreme Court in 1991, Marshall was known as “the Great Dissenter,” one of the last remaining liberal members of a Supreme Court dominated by a conservative majority.

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Yes, it came to that.

The way a tiny snowball rolls down a snow-covered mountain and barrels ahead until it becomes an avalanche, Blacks have made history one protest at a time.