And now the word comes down that John Lewis and C.T. Vivian have died, and so the Blob again is compelled to put aside childish things. Sportsball World can sit a spell. It's not like it's going anywhere, especially in these strange and troubled days.
The arc of history is long, Dr. Martin Luther King famously said once, but it bends toward justice. If so, it also provides a certain circularity that alternately comforts and disturbs. I suppose this is one of those times when it does both.
On the day two giants of the civil rights movement passed, after all, civil rights were again an issue in America, just as they were almost 60 years ago. People were marching in the streets again, just as Lewis and Vivian and so many others were then. And they were being met with brute force again, just as they were then.
The details have changed. But that is about all.
Sixty years ago, it was white mobs with lead pipes and clubs, and Bull Connor with his firehoses and police dogs. Today, it's tear gas, rubber bullets and shadowy goons pulling people off the street, throwing them into unmarked vans and driving them off to be detained and searched without warrants, probable cause or other such legal niceties.
The latter is happening in Portland, Ore., right now, an American city. It is happening without the consent of city officials or any of the governed. It is happening at the behest of the corrupt Bull Connor wannabe in the White House, who preaches law and order while aligning himself with felons and miscreants.
Just as Connor and his ilk did then, the wannabe labels the protesters as dangerous radicals intent on the destruction of the country. The order to invade an American city with unidentified brownshirts referenced "violent anarchists." The violence they were accused of, and specified in the orders, was ... scrawling graffiti on federal buildings.
So America is being threatened by subversive spray paint. Time to send in the gestapo, surely.
John Lewis and C.T. Vivian would have recognized all of this, unfortunately. In their last days, they might have heard echoes of an earlier time. And they might have shaken their heads in dismay.
But in the two of them, there are other echoes. And they are the echoes most worth hearing today.
Lewis was an idealistic young man and Vivian one of those he looked up to sixty years ago. They were Freedom Riders together. Lewis was savagely beaten in a bus depot in Alabama; Vivian was savagely beaten while in custody in Mississippi. Both wound up for a short time in Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm, as grim a penal institution as existed anywhere in America.
They could have retreated to the shadows, after all that. But after Lewis was beaten within an inch of his life in Alabama, he climbed right back on the bus again for the trip across Mississippi. And four years after Parchman Farm, both were on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Ala. -- where once again Lewis was beaten within an inch of his life.
If the arc of history is long, so are the echoes of that kind of courage.
From David Halberstam's "The Children":
John Lewis was in no condition to feel any exhilaration at the moment. He was lying on the ground in the bus depot soaked in his own blood, moving in and out of consciousness, hearing voices coming from distant place ... Lewis was, in his conscious flashes, still sure he was going to die. He had never seen so much blood. At least, he thought, his beliefs had not deserted him.
John Lewis was all of 21 years old when that happened.
Let the echoes ring long and loud.
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