Many thanks to Pam Spaulding for capturing John Lewis’ speech at Equality Alabama’s gala a couple of weekends ago. John Lewis is an American hero and a powerful speaker; it is fantastic to hear him speaking so strongly on this issue and declaring himself an ally to the GLBT community.
John Lewis took batons to the head, was beaten to unconsciousness multiple times for equality — courage and moral conviction that [Bishop Harry] Jackson and his fellow charlatans of bigotry are bereft of.
Rep. Lewis spoke eloquently about the simplicity of the government staying out of the lives of gay and lesbian couples — there is no need to “save” marriage from two people who simply want to love one another and be legally affirmed in the same way that heterosexual couples are when they marry.
But perhaps the most powerful message was to those in the LGBT community who are waiting for equality to come to them — Lewis charged us to seize the moment, do not accept being told to wait your turn, to demand your rights through your representative, and most of all take personal responsibility — the message we all heard was loud and clear.
May there be many more moments like this. Time is running out; I hope Mr. Elwin Wilson inspires courage among the countless others who also must come forward.
Elwin Wilson was an unabashed racist, the sort who once hung a black doll from a noose outside his home. John Lewis was a young civil rights leader bent on changing laws, if not hearts and minds, even if it cost him his life.
They faced each other at a South Carolina bus station during a protest in 1961. Wilson joined a white gang that jeered Lewis, attacked him and left him bloodied on the ground.
Forty-eight years later, the men met again — this time so Wilson could apologize to Lewis and express regret for his hatred. Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, greeted his former tormentor at his Capitol Hill office.
“I just told him that I was sorry,” Wilson, 72, said in a telephone interview Wednesday as he traveled home to Rock Hill, S.C. For years, he said, he tried to block the incident out of his mind “and couldn’t do it.”
Lewis said Wilson is the first person involved in the dozens of attacks against him during the civil rights era to step forward and apologize. When they met Tuesday, Lewis offered forgiveness without hesitation.
“I was very moved,” said Lewis. “He was very, very sincere, and I think it takes a lot of raw courage to be willing to come forward the way he did. … I think it will lead to a great deal of healing.”
Wilson said he had felt an urge to voice his remorse for years. He talked about his past activities a few weeks ago with a friend, and the friend asked him where he thought he might go if he died.
“I said probably hell,” Wilson said. “He said, ‘Well, you don’t have to.’” (Source)
Before he apologized to Representative Lewis, Mr. Elwin did something perhaps even more difficult: he faced some of the people he had harmed in his own community.
Wilson’s apology was first reported by The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald. After reading an article about local black civil rights leaders reacting to President Barack Obama’s inauguration, he and another former segregationist called the paper saying they wanted to apologize.
The paper aired their comments and documented an emotional meeting with the local activists at a former whites-only lunch counter in downtown Rock Hill, where Wilson had antagonized demonstrators during a 1961 sit-in.
After meeting with the local activists, Wilson realized that Lewis must have been the young black man he had attacked at the bus station that same year, when a bus carrying two Freedom Riders rolled into town.
If Mr. Elwin had only apologized to Lewis, I would be moved and impressed. But it is even more urgent that the people within communities where racist terror reigned find ways to face the truth and work towards reconciliation. Many perpetrators and victims and immediate family of victims have already died. Those who remain are aging, many elderly. As my friend Stanley Nelson at the Concordia Sentinel has put it, we can’t do much about slavery, but we can do something about this.
I’ve uploaded to scribd.com the complete PDF version my article in the March/April issue of ColorLines Magazine, “The Legacy of a Murder,” about the 1959 murder of Samuel O’Quinn in Centreville, MS. You can read it in the handy viewer, embedded in this post, or you can go to the article’s page on Scribd and download the PDF to your computer. (Hint: you can read the article in full browser mode by clicking on the browser icon in the top right of the scribd tool bar, below.)
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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