dancing for the joy of every man
by
Douglas Messerli
Dawn
Porter (director) John Lewis: Good Trouble / 2020
All
those who saw or heard former President Barack Obama’s moving eulogy at John
Robert Lewis’ Atlanta funeral, will already know many of the facts of Lewis’
life laid out in Dawn Porter’s CNN-sponsored film, John Lewis: Good Trouble;
specifically that growing up as a child of Troy, Alabama sharecroppers that he
desired even as a child to become a man of words, preaching to the family chickens—a
lot more responsive to his ruminations, he later claimed, than human beings
years after were to his political statements—and that many a morning after
breakfast he hid out under the house porch so that he might escape work in the
fields, racing down to the road only when the school bus appeared.
Lewis, even as a boy, knew the direction in
which he was headed; unlike his brothers, he was determined to get an
education, a desire which his parents supported despite the help he might have
provided them in their difficult agrarian labors.
Obama also retold the stories of Lewis’ early
involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, to which the young Lewis turned after
hearing a 1955 radio broadcast by Martin Luther King, and his gradual desire to
be trained in the tactics of non-violent action.
Soon after Lewis became even more involved
in the Nashville Student Movement, he and another member of the group daring to
ride a then-segregated Greyhound bus across a large swath of the country, afraid
even to leave the bus at stops for fear that the driver would refuse to let them
back on and might drive away without them.
Even worse, the Birmingham Riders, as
they were called, were beaten with baseball bats, pipes, and other objects.
Arrested by the police they were taken across the border into Tennessee and
released. After regrouping in order to ride into Montgomery, they were met with
yet further violence, Lewis’ head being hit with a crate. “I thought I was
going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,”
Lewis later commented.
Yet, despite our knowledge of some of
these feats, Lewis brushed them off as simply a way of getting into “good
trouble” As Lewis later wrote:
I
met Rosa Parks when I was 17. I met Dr.
King
when I was 18. These two individuals
inspired
me to find a way to get in the way,
to get
into trouble. So I got into good trouble,
necessary
trouble.—
Through Dawn Porter’s film we are visually
reminded, moreover, of just how young this thinly-framed, mustached, adolescent
really was. With him, we watch a reenactment by the waitress (still proud it
appears) who first told him he could not be served at the luncheon counter. And
several times Porter encourages the adult Georgia congressman, while viewing
such images for the first time since he had experienced them in person, to
comment on his feelings in that distant past.
As film critic Cristy Lemire observes:
Porter
does not press Lewis on any issues or
ask
him any uncomfortable questions. But
she
does offer him some moments of intro-
spection.
In one of her more intriguing story-
telling
tactics, she has Lewis sit on a sparse
soundstage
and review images from his own
history—some
of which he’d never seen
before—including
non-violent protest training
he
imparted to fellow African-Americans as
they
fought to integrate the South, suffering
vicious
beatings in the process. She also has
him
look directly into the camera and speak in
a way
that’s reminiscent of Errol Morris’ inter-
viewing
style, and Lewis’ combination of
warmth
and wisdom makes these statements
particularly
disarming.
In Porter’s film, moreover, we get images
that help us to recognize just how remarkable it was that leaders would chose the
then 23-year-old Lewis to become the chairman of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and just two years later would ask him and activist
Hosea Williams to lead fellow marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in
Selma, Alabama.
Waiting for them at the end of that bridge
were Alabama State Troopers who briefly ordered them to disperse. The marchers
dropped to their knees briefly to pray, while without any further hesitation
the police lobbed tear gas canisters at them and began to beat them indiscriminately
with their nightsticks. Lewis’ skull was fractured and, once again, as he later
reported, he imagined that he was going to die. The rest of the marchers had no
choice but to retreat.
At that point, Lewis claimed he was no longer afraid of death, which allowed him a great freedom he had never before felt.
At that point, Lewis claimed he was no longer afraid of death, which allowed him a great freedom he had never before felt.
As Obama retold the well-known horror
story of “Bloody Sunday,” at Lewis’ funeral, he added an important insight
about that event. That evening, Obama suggests, the troopers must have returned
home believing they had won their cause, perhaps celebrating it. But a short
time later even a larger group of Civil Rights protesters gathered, this time
far overwhelming any police force that might be gathered, successfully crossing
the bridge and marching on to Montgomery. Lewis could no longer join them,
suffering still from the pain of his beating, but he had become a symbol of the
righteousness of their cause.
Much of the rest of the film—after Lewis chose
to leave SNCC, in part because of Stokely Carmichael’s election as a chairman
who embraced the use of violence as a means of self defense—follows Lewis to
congress where, as he himself admits, he now stood on the other side of politics,
no longer an outsider but someone whose role was to work with others to make
important changes.
In many of these attempts to correct what
he saw as wrongs Lewis admittedly failed, despite his continued efforts to get
into “good trouble,” including his arrestment for holding a sit-in in the House
of Representatives. But as he grew older, he increasingly came to be seen as
the “conscience of Congress,” the man who both impassionedly and calmly spoke
out for the rights not only of blacks, but of women, and of the LGBT community.
He helped to pass provisions, after long years of work, to create the Martin
Luther King, Jr. Memorial along the banks of National Mall’s tidal basin; and
he fought hard for the construction of the National Museum of African American History
and Culture on Washington, D.C.’s mall.
It was moving to see, outside of the
context of Porter’s film, Lewis’ cortege stop at both of these sites as well as
the new Black Lives Matter Plaza, ordered by Washington, D.C. mayor Muriel
Bowser to be created in a two-block area near the White House on 16th
street.
Some of the most lovely scenes of this new
John Lewis film tale take place in his own home where, with his now deceased wife,
he had created a large collection of mostly black art; and at his office, where
during a birthday celebration, the man who claims he cannot sing was moved by
the cake his assistants awarded him to perform a spontaneous dance.
In a real sense, that dance releases some
of the deep seriousness and profundity of this great man’s life which we have
just re-experience, permitting him, for a few seconds at least, to once more
return to his true role as a joyful human being, who somewhat absurdly preached
not only to the chickens, but as his sister insists, to his siblings as well.
Lewis, it is clear, believed in the deep humanity of all of us and lived his
entire life attempting through words and actions to actualize that fact, that
we indeed are all equal in the eyes of God
and the State.
Having now lost this great voice, we need
desperately to seek it out again in others and, hopefully, within ourselves.
Los
Angeles, August 12, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and Green Integer Review (August 2020).
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