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Welcome to Sisters-in-Law, the podcast, episode eight, When Great Trees Fall. We lost two great trees yesterday, John Lewis, congressman, story civil rights activist, and Reverend C.T. Vivian, another great tree. You may not have heard of him, but he was great nonetheless.
And so we're going to talk about it on Sisters in Law, the podcast. We are real sisters, real lawyers, and we hope to have some really good talk. We're glad that you joined us. We are Janice and Davida Mathis, the Sisters in Law.
Despite the fact that John Lewis had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he still made the trek to Selma this year to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge one more time. Long before he was a congressman, John Lewis staked out his place in history.
Ambassador Young tells a story that Lewis wrote to Dr. Martin Luther King when he was still in high school, only about 14 years old. Dr. King responded by sending Lewis a bus ticket from his home in Marion, Alabama to come to Atlanta and worship with Dr. King at Ebenezer Baptist Church. That must have been a heady experience.
Lewis tells a story himself of how even as a child, he would gather the chickens in the backyard of his family home and preach to them. But once John Lewis met Dr. King, the fight, a non-violent fight, was on. You know, those people who find their calling early in life seem to me to be the most fortunate.
By 1963, he was the youngest speaker on the platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the Great March on Washington, where hundreds of thousands of people gathered to demand their civil and human rights. One story of that fateful day says that Dr. Dorothy Irene Hite, who at that time was president of the National Council of Negro Women, gave up her spot on the program so that John Lewis,
just barely in his teens could speak. By 1964, the following year, he was a member of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, based primarily in Nashville, where Lewis was a student at this. John Lewis was helping to organize Freedom Summer, the same dangerous effort to register voters in Mississippi
that resulted in the assassination of voter registration activists Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney. But it was on the stage of that same Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965 that the world came to know John Lewis. There is an iconic photo of a state trooper mounted on horseback beating Lewis, who was wearing a trench coat and a backpack.
I met John Lewis in later years and was proud to call him a friend. He once said to me, "What was in that backpack was a Bible, a banana, and a toothbrush." I guess that was standard fare for marchers and demonstrators in those days. On that bridge, he suffered a skull fracture that could have ended his life. In the civil rights movement, there's a saying that says, "Unearned suffering is redemptive."
On that day in March, in Selma, Alabama, John Lewis' suffering, along with that of 600 others, brought global attention to the denial of basic voting rights and inspired President Lyndon Johnson to say, "Enter the TV cameras and in and we shall overcome." A short time later, passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act renewed a centuries-long effort to redeem the soul of America.
As a congressman, Mr. Lewis was always on the right side of the issues, earning him the tribute, conscience of the Congress. Even his enemies, his political opponents called him that. He was a hero for every marginalized constituency seeking justice. Black people, the poor, he preached against anti-Semitism. The LGBTQ community looked up to him and depended on him for support.
He fought for immigrants and, of course, for women. He applied the same vigorous insistence on justice to every righteous cause it seemed. Now, John Lewis was from a politically safe, multicultural Atlanta district and was not constrained by the need to fund an election campaign or he wasn't worried about defeat. I can't tell you how many politicians that I spoke to along the way in Atlanta who
fantasized about being able to beat John Lewis and succeed him in that fifth congressional district. But that was just a fantasy. By then he had become more than a member of Congress. He was an institution. On one unforgettable day, he led members of Congress to adopt the sit-in tactics of the movement in support of reasonable gun reform. It was after Parkland. He sat still, cross-legged on the floor, patient,
Not fidgeting, not chatting, not looking at his phone, just sitting, seeing that he was sure that the arc of the moral universe was on his side. Well, history will remember John Lewis kindly. And one of his favorite sayings was, get into trouble, get into good trouble. He had a way of getting in the way of oppression and discrimination. Through it all, he managed to maintain an optimistic faith and a quick smile.
faith that participation in the system of democracy, though often flawed and inadequate, was worth getting in trouble for. John Lewis will be remembered for perseverance, often saying, never give up. His life is an example of why young people must be welcomed with open arms into the struggle for justice. He will be remembered for the rarity of treating women in the movement as full and equal colleagues. You know, there was a lot of
gender discrimination in the civil rights movement. He treated sheroes of the civil rights movement like Amelia Boynton, who was also severely beaten on Bloody Sunday, and his SNCC partner, Diane Nash, a brilliant woman with dignity and respect for their leadership. Congressman Lewis will be remembered for his enduring faith in the power of the vote, and his memory will stand as a signal to the proposition that activism is how change occurs.
We pay tribute to Congressman Lewis and reminds us of a poem from Maya Angelou, "When Great Trees Fall," the last verse of which says, "And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Space is filled with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses restored, never to be the same, whisper to us, 'They existed.'
They existed. We can be. Be and be better, for they existed. Today we are all better, and the nation is better, because John Lewis existed. When great trees fall, the great angel, it struck me that the word trees was used. It was plural, and it talked about great souls in the plural. And as God would have it, the Reverend C.T. Vivian, another great tree,
in the forest fell on the same day as John Lewis. Not coincidental, I don't think. Reverend C.T. Vivian was a great tree in the movement, but maybe not as well known as Congressman John Lewis, but great nonetheless. He's been called the field general for Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
And as he's remembered today, many talk about how he was a foot soldier and a field general and an organizer and a strategist. He was a Baptist minister who was in the inner circle of Dr. King with Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. He was the one who taught classes in how to be nonviolent.
He taught protesters and went on freedom rides, sat in at lunch counters, staged boycotts, boycotted businesses, and marched for weeks and months at a time, always going ahead of Dr. King to organize, organize, organize. If you ever saw marchers on TV being attacked by dogs and hoses and cattle prods and the like,
Those images that shocked the world into the consciousness of the civil rights movement. You probably saw Reverend C.T. Vivian because he was the person who organized those marches. And that's why he's called the field general. He once said nonviolence is the only honorable way of dealing with social change, because if we are wrong, nobody gets hurt but us.
And if we are right, more people will participate in determining their own destinies than ever before. And he was right. And the movement was right. We would not have known about the movement without Reverend C.T. Vivian. Even though we may not have known his name, he was a great giant in the forest of civil rights who fell on the same day as John Lewis.
C.T. Vivian's path was different from John Lewis. He was an older person. He was 95 years old when he passed away. He was a preacher, a minister, well into his career when he had the opportunity to speak in 1957. But from that moment on, he was on fire for the movement.
And as God would have it, he crossed paths with John Lewis in one of those training sessions to train for the freedom riots and for all types of protests from then until the time that they stopped protesting. But he never stopped in the civil rights movement. He was an author, a preacher, an activist, and an icon in the civil rights movement. And we mark his passing as another one of those great trees that fell.
Janice, if John Lewis' life teaches us that we should include young people, C.T. Vivian's life teaches us that we should not exclude middle-aged people. We should not exclude preachers who may not be at the forefront, but who are certainly at the center of the movement. And so I think the moral is that it takes all of us to win this freedom that we are fighting for.
One of the things that struck me about him being called a field general, most of the time in real military battles, the general is at the back of the line. He is in a tent surrounded by guards and carefully protected because as the leader, you don't want your leader to be struck down in the heat of battle.
But C.T. Vivian was not that kind of general. Most often he was on the front line, the first one to be struck. He was beaten many times. Sheriff Clark punched him in the face and sent him reeling down some steps in front of the courthouse in Selma when he tried to get Clark to admit black people to be registered to vote.
He was the one who took the beating first and led the way for his troops. That's one thing that distinguishes him from a military general, not sitting back in the comfort of a tent, but right up front, taking the worst of it. They sent him to jail, and even after he went to jail, he was beaten in the prison. He was arrested many, many times. I did have the privilege of knowing Mr. Reverend Vivian,
And he was such a gentle man that it's hard to imagine anyone having the temerity or the evilness to want to strike him. He's a very smart man. He was an only child from Missouri. And his first demonstration was way back in 1947, before he ever met Dr. King. He said he had studied the principles of Gandhi, but it wasn't until he heard Dr. King preach it that he really understood what it meant.
What a man. I had an opportunity to meet him at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. And Janice, what struck me, I knew what Reverend C.T. Vivian looked like, but I could not imagine a soul so gentle as he. He was so humble and so gentle.
Even in that moment where he was being honored, where he received the Congressional Medal of Freedom, even there at the march that he helped organize, the anniversary of the march he helped organize. He was so humble and so sweet and so kind. I said, could this be that great man that's sitting right here with me? And it was.
He was just a very gentle and sweet soul in addition to all the other things he did. He was a man in the Civil Rights War, but he was also a gentle man, which, you know, from reading and from experience, a lot of leaders are not. But he was a gentle and kind man in addition to being a great general and leader.
And we do ourselves a disservice when we say, well, he's not as well known, but we ought to make it our business to get to know Fred Shuttlesworth as well as others like Wyatt T. Walker and of course, Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Lawson and Beville and Diane Nash and so many others who were right there with Dr. King, working right beside him.
As a matter of fact, I didn't know until reading his biography just recently that he became the national director of 85 local chapters of SCLC from 1963 to 1966, right in the heat of the movement. And of course, SCLC is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was Dr. King's own organization.
But we owe it to ourselves. These people need to be taught. If we can learn about the presidents and the members of Congress and the cabinet members, certainly we ought to learn about these men and women who changed the very fabric of what it meant to be an American in the middle of the 20th century.
Well, Janice, you know, I'm hung up on Hamilton. And the reason I like Hamilton the musical is because they talk about our so-called founding fathers in a very familiar way, speaking of them as people and not as statues or historic figures, but speaking of them as everyday people. You know, I've said for a long time, and I'm going to continue to say, C.T. Vivian, Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis,
And so many more were the founding fathers and mothers of this country. If George Washington was a founding father, C.T. Vivian was a founding father, and John Lewis was a founding father, we should study them as such. Because this country, the world couldn't be the way it is now if these people had not done what they did.
And those scholars who studied this period of history, you mentioned what he said about nonviolence being the only honorable way of dealing with social change. He said in an address, he was quoted in the book
At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch. Taylor Branch, of course, wrote a series of Barring the Cross and At Canaan's Edge. The history has been documented, but it's up to us to take advantage of it. And he's also featured in several documentaries about the movement. That incident that I mentioned with old Sheriff Clark hit him in the face.
That is captured in Eyes on the Prize. So if you've seen that and you see those sheriff knocking a young, tall, good-looking young man in the face, that was C.T. Vivian. Yeah, but Jan, when will this be a part of public school curriculum?
to study these great personalities and energies who happen to be black and who happen to have changed this country and really gave birth to the country that we know. When will that be required reading? I don't know, but it's up to us to advocate and try to make it part of what every child needs to know about the United States.
In 1964, Vivian was nearly killed in St. Augustine, America's oldest continuously inhabited city, and at the time, one of the most rigidly segregated, and frankly, one of the places where Dr. King's movement did not make as much of a difference. Roving gangs of whites whipped Black bathers with chains and almost drowned C.T. Vivian.
in a biography that was written called Let the Trumpet Sound in 1982. This man was, he took more physical abuse. We know about John Lewis's beating and I'm not trying to compare or minimize, but C.T. Vivian was beaten over and over and over again and kept going back for more.
And you have to remember, he was the only child of a Missouri family who ended up studying theology at American Baptist Institute in Nashville. He was of a privileged middle class black background. And so many of them were. It's almost like those who had a little bit of privilege understood what others were being denied and they were willing to sacrifice in order to make it so.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said they were willing to sacrifice. The common thread was that they were willing to die for what they knew was right. And that's a hard charge. That is a very difficult charge. It's a Christ-like charge to be willing to die for what is right. But these young people, some young, some middle-aged, and some old, men and women, boys and girls,
had in common that they were willing to die for freedom and to bring it forward to Black Lives Matter. I was not shocked that so many people got out in the street during a pandemic for Black Lives Matter because the words have changed somewhat, but the movement, the ideology, the commitment have not changed.
And the fact that it is led mostly by younger people has not changed. C.T. Vivian wrote a book, and I confess I have not read it, but I'm going to try to find it. Black Power and the American Myth. That might be a good text for the Black Lives Matter movement now. I know that Black Lives Matter is not very fond of institutional organizations. They don't like hierarchy. They don't like centralized leadership.
But the notion of studying the philosophy behind your movement is one that Dr. King believed in, something he adopted from Gandhi, and something, frankly, he insisted on. And when I worked for Reverend Jesse Jackson, he said, you can't just like Dr. King. You got to emulate Dr. King. And that means preparing your mind to understand what the principles are that you're fighting for and why you should prevail. Well, I understand the...
the reticence to have a structure or very fast structure to Black Lives Matter. But that should not prevent us from knowing some history because this movement is a part of a continuum. It is not new. It's revived. And I thank God that it is revived, but it's not new.
And it won't end with this generation. You know, Vivian's first protest was in 1947, helping to desegregate a cafeteria. And it just struck me that the following year, our mother in Greenville, South Carolina, defied tradition by going downtown to register to vote. It was the first time since 1876
that African Americans in the town that we grew up in were allowed to register to vote. I looked at that picture yesterday. It was so out of the ordinary and noteworthy that her picture and the picture of, I think that's our granddaddy standing next to her, was put in the newspaper. In Greenville, South Carolina, we had two newspapers, the Greenville News that came out every morning and the Piedmont. The Piedmont was the evening paper and it was called the colored paper.
But the morning news, the Greenville news, was the white paper. This meant so much to white people that they put our Black mother and her Black father's picture in the morning paper, the white paper, to say that there's an end to the 72-year break in Negro vote. It's just remarkable that our people never stopped fighting for freedom and justice and equality.
From 1619 until now, the fight continues. Yes, it ebbs and it flows, it lows and it goes through different changes, but people have always been fighting and we do ourselves a disservice. You know what the old saying is, if you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. One I like even better is, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
And so when you look at Black Lives Matter, you see echoes of C.T. Vivian and Lawson and Beville and Dr. King and Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young. And certainly John Lewis. And certainly John Lewis.
who never lost his enthusiasm, who never lost his optimism that things would get better. And I can tell you, as an American of a certain age, an African American of a certain age, it's noteworthy that a person who had been through as much as he went through did not lose his optimism. He was constantly on the battlefield. He was constantly moving, constantly hoping.
I find that extraordinary and also inspirational. And I think anybody who studies these young people and middle-aged people and people of history will be inspired because the movement must continue. It morphs, it changes, it moves forward quickly, and then it slows down.
but it's the same movement. We shouldn't forget that. I think that is absolutely right. If I could point out just one thing about Vivian and Lewis, and I think for most of them, that on the one hand, they never gave up on protest and direct non-violent action. But on the other hand, neither did they give up on the political process. They understood that you needed both, that voting by itself is not enough.
because it doesn't put the necessary pressure on the status quo. But neither is protest by itself enough, because the people who are in charge of the policies that need to be changed are most often elected or appointed by people who are elected. So it's not an either or, it's a both and. Absolutely. And it wasn't a long time ago, Janice, I'm thinking about eight years ago,
or was it 12 years ago, that people were saying that we were post-racial, that the movement was dead, that we didn't need civil rights anymore. Much of that came from the fact that we had an African-American president. And I believe a lot of it came because people were ashamed of the marching tactic. They felt like we were beyond that historically and we were above it.
But isn't it interesting that marching was the result of something that happened in 2020? What's old is new again. And frankly, if we think back in our own personal story, 2006, we led one of the largest demonstrations that has ever occurred in Atlanta for reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.
We marched in order to preserve a law that protected our right to vote. Maybe if people had continued to march, we wouldn't have got the Shelby decision, which gutted the Voting Rights Act a few years later. It's naive to think that you can give up on what is right. I tell people, I'll stop marching when it stops working.
The only reason I'm not marching with Black Lives Matter now is that they tell me I'm in an age category that makes me vulnerable to sickness and I don't want my family to have to take care of me. But otherwise, I would be running from city to city right out there with the Black Lives Matter people because I know that it works. When we marched in 2006,
Before we got to the march, George Bush, who was president at the time, announced that he was going to support reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, something that everyone thought could not happen. But he heard us coming. He saw the organizing. Marching is not so much about the march.
as it is what it takes to put a successful march together. You organize marches. You know how much energy and money and time and perseverance it takes to get 15 or 20,000 people to do the same thing on the same day. It's no small feat. And in that process, you build alliances. You build confidence in each other. And you send a message to the larger world, here we come.
And I'll tell you something else, Jan. It's very easy to say after you've organized a march of 10 or 20 or 30, 40,000 people, it's very easy to say this time we'll march to the polls because the people are already galvanized. They already have seen their strength. They know what the cause is and they know how to get it. So marching to the polls is nothing but
after you've marched in the streets. It's very effective, but it's a whole lot easier to march to the polls after you have marched in the streets. Well, I'm grateful to the leaders of Black Lives Matter and to the followers because without pressure, you don't get much social change. And for everyone who thought that we were in a post-racial environment in the Obama years, well, that just shows
a lack of appreciation. There was progress in the 1870s. There was a Civil Rights Act in the 1870s. Yeah, you heard of Reconstruction? If you haven't, you need to Google it. There was a Freedmen's Bureau. There was Howard University established. We were making remarkable progress until white people decided that we were the enemy.
And all of a sudden there was a compromise and federal troops were withdrawn from the South and we were left without protection from the worst elements of the remnants of the Confederacy. That's what led to the 72 years with no black voting in the South.
Well, and we know from that withdrawal of the United States from the South and from those people who had been freed from slavery, we know that there was a reign of terror. That's right. And there is to this day a reign of terror of some kind, the reign of terror in the form of the Klan and Knight Riders.
those who would take over enforcing racism and Jim Crow and scaring people out of voting, terrorizing freed slaves. And so they ran rampant. This period to me is reminiscent of that period from 1876-1879
to 1890s when Plessy versus Ferguson was decided. Blacks have no rights that whites are bound to respect. One of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever made. This period reminds me of that because for us, Barack Obama meant the realization of a dream deferred, the actualization of our ability to have self-reliance
control over our destiny. But for others, it represented a loss of control, a loss of power, and it was fearful. But Janice, let me ask you a rhetorical question. When have we not been in that reign of terror in the United States of America? I think there was a brief period between 1963 and 1973.
or there about '75, when it looked as if we were making progress and moving out of that period. It was brief. I think that just like after the Civil War, there was a brief period, about 10, 15 years, when it looked like things were going to get better. But the forces of discrimination and oppression
Didn't take them long to reorganize themselves. Certainly in the Obama years, it looked as if the worst of racism might have been behind us. But at that very moment, the forces of darkness were organizing to regroup and retake power. That's what we have to realize is that they never sleep. They never sleep. That's what I think. You talk about 64 to 70. Well, Dr. King was assassinated in 68. 68.
Shelby was decided while Barack Obama was president. The Voting Rights Act was gutted while Obama was president. And so those are just examples of how, in my mind, the terror has never stopped. From lynchings all the way to police shooting unarmed Black people, it has never stopped. And we have never stopped. I talk about a lot the reign of terror
But white people ought to be tired of terrorizing us. You would think they'd get tired of losing. Because we keep going even though they terrorize us. And we're going to keep going now. If we were capable of being destroyed and run out of this country, it would have happened by now. Right.
They should be tired. But some forces, not all white people, certainly, but some forces are not tired. They're scared. And the scared person sometimes does more extreme things than just a plain terrorist. Well, there's a colloquial expression, a scared person is a dangerous person. Very dangerous. Well, believe it or not, we've talked about
our time up. But you know, I found it just so comforting that you brought to our minds that poem, When Great Trees Fall. I thought about Daddy. I don't know if you knew, but there were two times about 10 years apart from each other that Daddy said to me, I would hope there's something that I can do in heaven. Oh yes, he said that to me too. And I said, like what?
And he said, like, help people. And fast forward 10 years later, he was in a different position. I was, too. He said the same thing to me. And I had forgotten for a moment the question 10 years earlier. I would hope that there's something to do in heaven. I said, like what? He said, like, help people. Well, when I thought about John Lewis and C.T. Vivian and this moment in history and their histories,
I thought I would hope that there's something that they can do in heaven like help. Well, one thing they can certainly do if we study their lives and study their writings and keep their memories alive, they can help us to persevere. When great trees fall. Say some more of it, Jane. Well, I don't know it by heart, so let's see if I can find it so that I can say it. It's a very famous poem.
and I wish I knew more of it, but I just don't. I can say a little bit of it, and when you find it, you can say a little bit of it, and that'll be Sisters-in-Law. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe briefly. Our eyes briefly see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory suddenly sharpened.
examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away.
We are not so much madness reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period, peace blooms, slowly and always, irregularly. Spaces filled with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses restored, never to be the same, whisper to us, they existed, they existed.
We can be, be and be better for they existed. Thanks for joining us for Sisters-in-Law, the podcast, episode eight, When Great Souls Fall.
