The Long View: John Lewis

The congressman and civil-rights legend will never lose hope.

- By Zak Cheney-Rice

Lewis was arrested 40 times as an activist. He has been arrested five times since becoming a member of Congress. Photograph by Michael Avedon.

JOHN LEWIS HAS SEEN a lot in his 80 years, from a modest youth as the third of ten children in an Alabama sharecropping family, to a brutal and exhilarating early adulthood in the civil-rights movement, to his storied tenure in Congress, where he’s represented Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since 1987. But his later years have been marked by novelty, much of it lamentable: the election of Donald Trump, who he believes is the worst president for civil rights in his lifetime, and a more intimate struggle— his diagnosis in December with stage-four pancreatic cancer. Neither the ups nor the downs have much swayed his sense of optimism. Even this latest test— the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the protests, rioting, and often violent police crackdown that followed— has engendered in Lewis abundant cause for hope. On the eve of the July 3 release of Good Trouble, a documentary about his life and work, New York spoke to the congressman about why he’s staying the course— even when he fears waking up one day to find that our democracy has disappeared.

I’m curious, watching what’s happened this past week or so, what has stood out to you?