His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope [J0405]

2020 HCDJ in nice clean condition. John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a minister, practiced by preaching to his family's chickens. When his mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it-his first act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God-and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century." A believer in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working for social and political change.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A very good book on a influential man in the Civil Rights Movement. I didn't know much about John Lewis, but he was a major player in the non violent school for change. This book covers a ton about him during this period, and the movement in general."; "Having read this I now feel like I never properly appreciated a man who was a national treasure, who was , as the author put so beautifully, fascinating because he was IN the world but not really OF it."; "We read of sit-ins, the lunch counters of Nashville, the bus stations of Montgomery, and the streets of Birmingham. We read of the March on Washington, Freedom Rides and Bloody Sunday; police dogs and fire hoses, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan; and finally the end of Jim Crow and the passage of voting rights for blacks."; "An absolutely brilliant read. Jon Meacham does an wonderful job of bringing this amazing life of John Lewis to us. From cover to cover you will take a journey like no other. A book that should be in every high school history class. This book is worth your time."