Historic swearing-in of Obama recalls earlier struggle for civil rights

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‘It’s almost too much to contemplate’

WASHINGTON: For Mr John Lewis, the sea of people jam-packed on a chilly winter’s day at the National Mall on Inauguration Day is a throwback to the summer of 1963, when a similar crowd gathered on the green.

Then – on Aug 28, 1963 – the civil rights movement had only just begun.

‘It’s almost like history…fate…time just coming together,’ he said in an interview with American political newspaper Politico, referring to the parallels between the historic civil rights march on Washington on Aug 28, 1963 and the historic inauguration yesterday of America’s first black President.

‘It’s almost too much to contemplate.’

The inauguration of Mr Barack Obama, the first African-American President, comes just one day after the national celebration of the birthday of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who led the March on Washington For Jobs and Freedom on that August day 46 years ago.

On that late summer day, more than 250,000 people took the 1.6km trek from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial – where Dr King gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech – to demand fair pay, voting rights and social justice for African- Americans.

Mr Lewis, a 68-year-old congressman from Georgia, was then just 23 and the youngest speaker there, as the national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

‘You saw these young people – some up in trees to get a better view, and then there were others with their feet in the water, just trying to cool off. Black and white,’ Mr Lewis told Politico.

For him, perhaps the most compelling link between Mr Obama’s inauguration and the civil rights movement is the struggle for voting rights.

Mr Lewis led – and was badly beaten during – the 1965 march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama, that ended in bloody confrontations with state troopers.

The marchers came up against tear gas, bullwhips and nightsticks. Some were trampled on by the troopers’ horses.

That march, together with two other rallies, marked the peak of the American civil rights movement. It also led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, without which, Mr Lewis said in his interview, ‘Barack wouldn’t be president’.

‘One of the things I’ve been reflecting on since the election,’ he told Politico, ‘is the number of individuals who stood in those unmovable lines in Alabama and Mississippi and other parts of the South, just trying to pass a so-called literacy test’ – which was required to go to the polls in those days.

‘Just daring, literally putting their bodies on the line, to attempt to register to vote.’

After those early tumultuous years, Mr Lewis pressed on with the battle in quieter ways, spending seven years as the director of the Voter Education Project, which added some four million minority voters to the rolls. He has also continued to battle voter discrimination and intimidation as a member of Congress.

Those memories of the crowds that summer’s day in 1963 would come back to him over the years as he looked out the window of his Capitol Hill office.

Now, however, history has been supplanted by the future.

Mr Obama’s election is a source of pride for African-Americans, who voted for him in overwhelming numbers.

But even a veteran black activist like Mr Lewis believes that his election goes beyond what he and others had worked so hard for for years.

‘Something’s happening in America, something some of us did not see coming. Barack Obama has tapped into something that is extraordinary,’ he said.

Yesterday’s inauguration will not mark the end of the struggle for Mr Lewis.

‘The election of Barack Obama is a major downpayment on the dream. The dream is not paid in full,’ Politico quoted him as saying.

‘So after the shouts of joy and hallelujah and being on the mountaintop, we’ve got to come down to the valley, as Dr King has said, and do the heavy lifting, do the necessary work.

‘But I’ll probably cry before he takes the oath of office,’ Mr Lewis added. ‘Because my mind will reflect. It will go back to that day, Aug 28, 1963, when we saw that sea of humanity.’