Finding a Place: A Conversation with John Lewis

This article was published in Museum News May/June 2006

Beginning with his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) has championed human rights throughout his career. As a college student, he organized sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville. He nearly died after he was beaten severely for participating in the Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. The young Lewis soon became a recognized leader among civil rights activists. At the age of 23, he was a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. Two years later he helped lead more than 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where they were attacked by Alabama state troopers. That day, March 7, 1965, became known as “Bloody Sunday” and helped spur the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1986, Lewis was elected to Congress to represent Atlanta and its environs. He has worked tirelessly for 15 years to gain congressional authorization for the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, submitting legislation in every session of Congress. The bill passed the House in 2001 and was signed into law in 2003. In January, the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents—following the recommendation of a presidential commission—announced that the new museum will be located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It is expected to open to the public around 2016.

Lewis recently sat down with Museum News Editor-in-Chief Jane Lusaka to discuss how the museum came to be, the African-American community’s support of cultural projects, and the importance of history.

Museum News: Why do you think it took so long for the National Museum of African American History and Culture to come to fruition?

John Lewis: Well, it had the support of the majority of the members of the House and the Senate, but from time to time we had some individuals—in one or two cases, one individual—who held up the legislation.

There was some argument that if we have a museum of history and culture for African Americans, then we would have to do it for other ethnic groups. That was part of it, and then I think there was one member of the Senate who was just vividly opposed and he didn’t want to see anything happen.

On one occasion it had passed in the House but failed to pass in the Senate. Senator Dole and Senator Mitchell [the Republican and Democrat leaders in the Senate at the time] were prepared to try to get it through. They both called me and said, in effect, “We don’t have anything to trade to Senator Helms.” Jesse Helms put a hold on it, and so it died.

It’s amazing how one man can stand in the way of progress.
The Senate has a strange rule that any member of that body of 100 can put a hold on any piece of legislation—[whether it be] nominating somebody for a position on the Supreme Court or as a district judge or as some other member of the executive branch of government.

What are your thoughts on presenting this history as an American story rather than an African-American story?
To tell the complete history of America you have to tell the whole story of the African-American experience.

From the days of our landing on these shores, the days that we were brought across the ocean as slaves and through the period of slavery, struggle, and lynching, and the whole system of economic servitude and sharecropping and the whole struggle for civil rights—that story must be told.

We will never be able to appreciate the fullness of the American experience unless we include the whole story of the African-American experience. It is American history. It is the history of struggle, the history of survival. Hopefully telling this story will inspire a generation yet unborn not to make some of the mistakes that people made in the past. Hopefully, as some of my colleagues would say, it will lead to reconciliation, help bring people together as one nation, as one people.

It’s interesting that Senator Helms’s objection was that there would have to be a museum for every ethnic group if there was one for African Americans. What’s wrong with telling everybody’s story?
I don’t have any problem with other ethnic groups [establishing their own museums]. Already the Hispanic caucus has drafted a similar piece of legislation, which has been introduced [in the House]. Except for Native Americans, we all come from some other part of the world, and the American community is going to become browner and browner. I think it would be fitting and appropriate [to establish a museum] for the Hispanic population who will emerge in a short time as the majority population. They may be the majority, and the rest of us will be minorities.

One of the things that I’ve heard repeated often is that while black people contribute generously to church, to school, to educational causes, they don’t contribute as much to cultural activities or to museums. Do you feel that museums are not sending the right message to the black community? Or is it that African Americans don’t have an appreciation of their history, perhaps because of the legacy of slavery and the sense of shame that sometimes accompanies it?
In the case of this museum, this project, I think you’ll see a growing number, a significant number of African Americans, who are prepared [to contribute]. Not just those at the top with a lot of resources, a lot of money, but even people at the bottom will give a little.

I hear it all over the country: “How is the museum coming?” To have a National African-American Museum of History and Culture on the Mall in Washington—people want to buy into that and have ownership of it. It is my understanding that a focus group was conducted about fund-raising possibilities in the African-American community, and overwhelmingly the study showed that people are willing and prepared to give of themselves.

I think under the direction of founding director Lonnie G. Bunch we will witness a grass-roots movement on the part of African Americans and other Americans to raise the necessary money to build this museum. People want to have a part of it. They want ownership. I can see schoolchildren, church groups, fraternities and sororities, old-time folk, social organizations and clubs saying we want to help build this museum in Washington. We want to help. We want to be part of it.

In the past, the leaders of black museums have expressed concern that a national museum might overshadow their institutions. What do you say to them?
I had an opportunity to talk with and speak at the conference of the Association of African American Museums in July 2005. The group seemed to readily accept the idea of this museum, [to understand] that it will not be in competition with local museums but will work with them and be complementary. They were hopeful that we would have in this museum exhibits and programs that would be made available to local African-American museums all across the country, and I think it’s going to be very helpful.

The resources of the Smithsonian through the African American Museum will be made available to these local museums. So while in the beginning, in the very beginning, some members of the association had some concern, I think their concern is gone for the most part.

You have been at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement for more than 40 years. What is your assessment of the current state of race relations in America? Can a museum shape or change attitudes about something as fundamental and personal as race?
A museum can play a major role, a very important and really vital role in helping to shape attitudes about race. It can help educate, help inform people. Earlier today I spoke to about 500 young children, black and white, elementary-school students from the D.C. public schools and told them some of the stories of the Civil Rights Movement. The new museum would be able to tell in such a dramatic fashion the information and stories that people didn’t learn in school. Not just in [elementary] school, but even at the college level.

So much about the African-American experience has been left out of the textbooks. It is my hope and prayer that when children and those not so young walk through this museum they will be able to feel and touch, almost smell, a sense of history. I think it would make our nation and our people a better nation and a better people.

The museum could show that, yes, we made unbelievable changes. We’ve come a great distance. We made a lot of progress. But regarding the struggle to make America complete and to build a more perfect union, if I can use that phrase, a more peaceful nation, more inclusive nation, we still have a way to go.

Have you thought about how the museum might convey that story? How do you make the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s relevant to a 21st-century audience?
I would love to see, somewhere in the museum, technology that shows what happened and how it happened during the 20th century [and before]—the struggle against slavery, against lynching, during the latter part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. To show another group of people at another time that didn’t have a website, or a fax machine or a cellular telephone, but they used what they had. I want to say to young people, you too can be part of an effort to make our society better. The museum can talk about leadership that has come out of the business community, out of churches, out of sororities and fraternities. But it also came from the young people who were inspired by Rosa Parks and by Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is a way to make history live again. I remember walking past the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.—the church where Martin Luther King, Jr., began his civil rights work. I felt as if I had been transported back in time.
Go to Little Rock, Ark., and visit the center there that deals with the struggle to desegregate schools in Little Rock. Go to Topeka, Kans. [where the landmark Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation got its name]. Go to Birmingham or to Memphis or [to other sites of the Civil Rights Movement], to Montgomery at the Rosa Parks Museum. You feel like you’re [in 1955], like you’re on the bus with Rosa Parks, that you are there.

I think the new museum should be able to do that, too. We all won’t be able to go to Montgomery or to Selma and walk across the bridge or to Birmingham and visit the church where the four little girls were killed. But here in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, people who come not just from all over America but from all over the world will be able to feel and visualize this piece of history.

But how do you help young people today grasp the concept of nonviolence? How do you make it real for them?
How do you say to someone, don’t strike back, bear this burden? How do you put [nonviolence] against lawlessness? How can you demonstrate that? How can you put that in a video and have people feel it? Perhaps the new museum could have some type of interactive training workshop to show how people grew to adhere to the philosophy of nonviolence [during the Civil Rights Movement]. I could see something like the Nashville Public Library’s Civil Rights Room, which has a lunch counter where you can come and sit, the same way the young people did in 1960.The National Museum of African American History and Culture will give people that feeling of [experiencing] another generation, people who had the courage to raise themselves up, plant themselves in a particular spot, to serve as witnesses. Given the resources and imagination and research [available to us now], we could do a great deal.