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354 pages, Hardcover
First published October 13, 2020
"To John Lewis, the truth of his life--a truth he had lived out on that bridge in 1965--was of a piece with the demands of the gospel to which he dedicated his life since he was a child. He was moved by love, not by hate. He was 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 creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is a fact--observable, discernible, undeniable fact."
This is not a full-scale biography. It is, rather, an appreciative account of the major moments of Lewis’s life in the movement, of the theological understanding he brought to the struggle, and of the utility of that vision as America enters the third decade of the twenty-first century amid division and fear.This is an apt description of the book. Jon Lewis has written much about his life, from his autobiography, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, to the Eisner Award winning trilogy of graphic novels, March, but Meacham brings his skill as a veteran journalist and former seminarian to give readers a sense of the spirit and unconditional love that drove Lewis to become the icon of non-violent resistance that shaped his career, from lunch-counter protester to congressional heavyweight.