Frictions Haunt Rights Hero of Past
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He left his blood on the streets of Selma, Rock Hill and Montgomery for the landmark civil rights bills of the 1960’s, and John Lewis believes the moral issues that resonated then must resonate again. “It is a shame and a disgrace that, in 1991, we are still debating whether or not we should protect our fellow American citizens from discrimination,” Mr. Lewis, now a United States Representative from Atlanta, said last month as he called on the House to pass the latest civil rights bill. Mr. Lewis, whose balding head bears the scars from beatings he received while being arrested about 40 times in the South in the 1960’s, represents as much as any living American the heart and soul of the civil rights battles that changed the nation three decades ago. And as Congress lurches along in its struggle over the civil rights bill, which the House passed last month, he is also a symbol of the frustrations and contradictions surrounding civil rights issues today. For Mr. Lewis, civil rights is still an issue of morality. When he attended dedication ceremonies this week for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, he marked a continuity of vision that goes from the streets of the South to the halls of Congress. Some Difficult Questions But the dissension brought out in the debate over the civil rights bill has posed difficult questions even for Mr. Lewis: Does civil rights address the core problems facing minority groups today? Have the bill’s proponents erred tactically and philosophically in putting it at the top of the Congressional agenda this year? What is the best way to build broad-based support for addressing the problems of the poor? The questions come quicker than the answers. Time has rounded out the slender frame that Mr. Lewis had in the days of the Freedom Rides. But, at the age of 51, his voice is still rich with the slow cadences of rural Alabama, and he still has the same dogged commitment he has had ever since he first heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preach a scratchy radio sermon in 1955. The story of Mr. Lewis, who was born the son of a sharecropper in Troy, Ala., on Feb. 21, 1940, has become a staple of civil rights lore — from his beginning as a shy farm boy who preached to the barnyard chickens to his service on the front lines of the Freedom Rides and sit-ins that changed the South. More : query.nytimes.co |