Rush Limbaugh recently said that John Lewis would not have suffered a fractured skull at Selma if he had been armed. That is a profound misunderstanding of just about everything that could be understood about Bloody Sunday or the Civil Rights Movement more generally. John Lewis’s fractured skull, while not exactly the plan, was the key to the success of Selma.
On March 7, 1965 — a day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday” — Lewis and fellow activist Hosea Williams led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers, who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Lewis’s skull was fractured, but he escaped across the bridge, to a church in Selma. Before he could be taken to the hospital, John Lewis appeared before the television cameras calling on President Johnson to intervene in Alabama.
Scenes of the violence, and of the injured John Lewis, were broadcast around the world, and outraged public opinion demanded that the President take action. Two days later, Dr. King led 1,000 members of the clergy on a second march from Selma to Montgomery, with the eyes of the world watching. A week and a day after Bloody Sunday, President Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress to demand passage of the Voting Rights Act, empowering the federal government to enforce the voting rights of all Americans. The passage of the voting rights act finally brought the federal government into the struggle, squarely on the side of the disenfranchised voters of the South.
John Lewis’s skull fracture hastened the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which may not have passed otherwise for many years. His personal courage and sacrifice are so immense, and so many people are indebted to him, including me, that Rush Limbaugh really shouldn’t utter his name, unless it is to pay him the deep respect that he deserves.
To call him the greatest living American would not be hyperbole, for who would we put before him?
He accomplished through peaceful means what years of armed struggle would never have achieved. What’s unusual is that, unlike others in his category, like Socrates and Jesus and Lincoln and Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., he lived to tell about it. He’s still serving in Congress, doing his little part each day. But he is so much more than a congressman. He’s a giant who doesn’t get the credit he deserves simply because he wasn’t martyred and because he’s too humble to demand it.
I’ve been disheartened that there has not been more of a tribute paid to Lewis’ wife upon her passing.
I do not admire many politicians, especially those currently in office. John Lewis is a hero, and he deserves admiration, and some god damn respect. Instead, he gets spat on both figuratively and literally by asshole teabaggers and Rush Limbaugh. Lewis is and was a radical.
His office responded in any case:
Civil Rights Leader Rep. John Lewis Responds To Limbaugh’s Gun Claim: We Chose Non-Violence
What a beautiful, monumentally dignified response.
Look, please look at yet another amazing thing John’s love has wrought:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y77fUFUfk9I
Yeah, you got me- I can’t think of a greater living American.
And Rosa Parks could have kept that seat if she’d been packing.
There are two counterexamples that prove Rush is a nitwit:
Bobby Hutton
Fred Hampton
Word, TarheelDem. I’m prayerful that Rush even lost many dittoheads on this one.
We (not Rush) can also take instruction from Jackie Robinson’s successful snapping of the color line in baseball. If Jackie would’ve defended his honor against the horribly racist vomit spewed on him by players, managers and fans in his first years, Branch Rickey’s courageous experiment may have failed, regardless of Robinson’s on-field performance.
Obama’s first Presidential campaign and term were similarly limited by his real need to avoid being pigeonholed as the angry black man. I don’t expect him to take vicious revenge on the haters as Jackie did in his later years, but I’m happy that Barack is behaving in a freer manner now; it’s appropriate. I’m not only happy on the President’s behalf- I’m happy on behalf of the entire progressive and liberal movement. At some point it seems to me that vile statements and barely coded racism in response to mildly liberal policy positions must be labeled vile and racist. We can’t allow this to become the new normal.
Yes. Indeed.
In a culture saturated with guns and violence, nonviolence become power. When well acted out.
Rush Limbaugh knows nothing of history, nor does he care. What Rush Limbaugh does is take key hot topics and explode them in angry, hate-filled rhetoric and therefore fires up his idiot listeners. He always takes the wrong side of any topic and blows it up to suit his purposes. The fact that he makes millions of dollars doing it is repugnant.
Rush Limbaugh isn’t fit to speak John Lewis’s name out loud. He isn’t fit to lick Lewis’s shoes, and he is the opposite of everything John Lewis stands for.
So Limpball’s premise if Lewis and others woulda been armed then….what? The police woulda ran away in fear? There would have been no confrontation?
Limpballs is a moron.
Lewis with a gun in 1965 would have looked like revolution. Lewis did not want to over throw the government…he wanted to participate in the existing government.
If he had been armed he would quickly have been shot by Alabama State Troopers. And anyone near him would have also been shot in a hale of bullets.
Just to make the clear obvious: what Limbaugh is saying is that its too bad that Lewis didn’t have a gun, because then he could have shot down the state troopers. If a Democrat, or, gods forbid, a black Democrat advocated armed insurrection s/he’d be dead or in solitary confinement somewhere. It’s OK if you’re a neo-nazi.
An ARMED John Lewis in 1965 Alabama?
we’d be visiting his gravestone.
Rush is trying to put that gun in Lewis’ hand because that would get him the result that he wishes today would have happened at that time back in Alabama.
Rush is basically using this as a way to say, “The only good ni*er is a dead ni*er”, without actually saying it. He might as well be dressed up in a white sheet.
“He accomplished through peaceful means what years of armed struggle would never have achieved.”
Violence was enough to afford your citizenship in a country that murderously purged its natives. Violence was enough to afford your privilege in a country that uses whiteness as evidence of social value. Violence was enough to afford the slaves that make up the foundation of American wealth. Violence was enough to make sure your voice and your perspective would be historically prized above black people’s. Violence was enough to afford the transfer of their labor’s fruits to you. Violence was enough to afford your peaceful existence in a country where they did not and do not protest too loudly or quickly. Indeed, violence is enough to afford your ability to call the potential for violence from other demographics less useful than being the silent, saint-like recipients of violence.
It’s very easy to righteously condemn people who come off as more racist than you. I’d be less irked if you didn’t so confidently proceed under the notion that your premises are much better. In his reality, Limbaugh propels both the erasure of history and the shameless appropriation of black history to service the cause of gun fanatics. In yours, you draw a direct connection between John Lewis’s skull fracture and the VRA without drawing a similarly direct connection between the KKK, lynching, Jim Crow and the NEED for the VRA. I would only ask you why the same violence that historically and presently ensures black oppression suddenly becomes a picture of ineffectualness when potentially applied by black people. The answer to that question would make the need to endure a skull fracture worthy of something less than your unconditional celebration. Violence was not powerless.
John Lewis with a gun. Right.
There was a reason that Malcolm X was requested to stay out of the South. The same reason he respected that request.
So the Alabama and Mississippi Troopers would not have the excuse to execute the Civil Rights leadership.
Screw the doping pedophile, he knows nothing of history.
If Sandra Fluke had been armed….