COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 20/07/2020
Jon Allsop
ON FRIDAY, JOHN LEWIS, the civil-rights icon and longtime Georgia Congressman, died. He was 80, and had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He addressed the March on Washington, in 1963; had his skull fractured by state troopers on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, in 1965; and served as chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee until his ouster by Stokely Carmichael, in 1966. Over the weekend, tributes to Lewis poured forth, including in the press. By the time of his death, Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, Lewis “had been bound so tightly and for so long to the mythos of the movement for democracy in America that it was difficult to separate him from it. For this reason, a friend who texted me ‘John Lewis is gone, what are we going to do now?’ was not only reacting to grief but expressing a real and common sentiment.”