His Truth Is Marching On by Jon Meacham (Review)
If there is a way to give a book a full endorsement while still wanting much more, then this acclamation is what I want to write. His Truth Is Marching On is the fourth Jon Meacham book I’ve read after American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, and Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. Simply put, Jon Meacham is a wonderful biographer, and that remains true with his John Lewis biography. But the other Meacham books I’ve read are comprehensive, and His Truth Is Marching On is not.
I should have expected the shortened subject, given how much smaller this book is compared to Meacham’s previous biographies. Meacham focuses almost exclusively on Lewis in relation to the Civil Rights Movement. He gives a solid dose of Lewis’s early life and then a summary of his congressional career as part of the epilogue. I would have welcomed doubling the book’s length to include a full analysis of the bookends to Lewis’s life beyond the 50s and 60s. So despite my desire for more, the history that Meacham explored is comprehensive, insightful, and excellent. With the disclosure that His Truth tells only one part of John Lewis’s larger story, I fully recommend Meacham’s latest book for everyone.
The following includes some of what I learned from the book:
Meacham began by describing the critical role of religion—specifically Christianity—in moving the civil-rights leaders to act and moving the nation to change. As John Lewis later noted, “it was religion that got us on that bus...”
In the book’s overture, Meacham had this excellent assessment when comparing the protagonists in this story with the history that is so often dominated by warriors, generals, and statesmen: “The heroes of this story laid down no fire, but rather walked into fire. The heroes of this story drew no blood, but rather shed their own. The heroes of this story sought no spoils, but rather asked only that the founding words of the national experiment be logically applied to all.”
Lewis credited pastor and theologian, Walter Rauschenbusch, as a major influence in his philosophy. Martin Luther King, Jr. summarized Rauschenbusch as follows, “The Gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.” This is in close alignment with how Dietrich Bonhoeffer viewed Christianity.
While at American Baptist College, Lewis faced a tension between the Gospel and the social gospel. He did not see these matters as mutually exclusive. Lewis also thought it was incomplete to ignore the realities like widespread injustice that people were facing.
The background on James Lawson and Howard Thurman was helpful. I knew of Gandhi’s influence on MLK, but I didn’t realize that Gandhi had influenced a larger number of civil-rights leaders. King read Gandhi’s writing and visited India in 1959, but those around King interacted directly with Gandhi.
Lawson taught that the non-violence movement could not be suppression of the desire to hit back when struck by others. Instead, that desire for vengeance must be replaced by love. There can only be love for those inflicting harm.
It is jarring to consider Lewis’s experiences at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi. It doesn’t take much reading about WWII to imagine the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. Yet even a brief and sanitized telling of the Freedom Riders’ time at Parchman sounds more like wartime Germany than 1960s America. Lewis was arrested for entering a segregated bathroom, and the punishment in Parchman included being stripped naked for hours, being sprayed down with hoses, and more. Parchman Penitentiary eventually had its practices curtailed by a lawsuit, but it is startling to think about what happened just a few decades ago in the United States.
This self-assessment by Lewis resonates with me: “I am not without passion; in fact, I have a very strong sense of passion. But my passion plays itself out in a deep, patient way. When I care about something, when I commit to it, I am prepared to take the long, hard road, knowing it may not happen today or tomorrow, but ultimately, eventually, it will happen.”
I don’t remember previously reading about the 1964 nomination process to place LBJ on the Democratic ticket for president. Mississippi civil-rights activists created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) because African Americans were barred from participating in the Mississippi Democratic Party. The MFDP appealed to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to recognize their group instead of the all-white delegation from Mississippi but were rejected. The event caused a significant conflict for the DNC and had a sobering effect on John Lewis, who later wrote: “As far as I'm concerned, this [the DNC conflict] was the turning point of the civil rights movement…despite every setback and disappointment and obstacle we had faced over the years, the belief still prevailed that the system would work, the system would listen, the system would respond. Now, for the first time, we had made our way to the very center of the system. We had played by the rules, done everything we were supposed to do, had played the game exactly as required, had arrived at the doorstep and found the door slammed in our face.”
LBJ offered the following speech on the Voting Rights Bill: “There is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans—not as Democrats or Republicans—we are met here as Americans to solve that problem. This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose. The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal.’”
Meacham describes the importance of Selma as follows: “It is difficult to overstate Selma’s significance…not because of a conventional clash of forces but because the conventions of history were turned upside down. Selma changed hearts and minds when Americans watched the brutal forces of the visible world meet the forces of an invisible one, and the clubs and horses and tear gas were, in the end, no match for love and grace and nonviolence.”
Jon Meacham’s excellent book is just shy of 400 pages, and my only critique is that it doesn’t include another 400. One element that I considered when reading about Frederick Douglass and the abolitionist movement is that I wanted to know more about the legislative process that ran parallel to the effort to change the minds and hearts of Americans. Similarly, I would like to know more about how the Civil Rights Movement shaped John Lewis the lawmaker. His is a unique role to have been both a voice in a movement and a voice as a congressman. I look forward to learning more about John Lewis in the second stage of his career at a later time and wholly recommend His Truth Is Marching On as a wonderful description of Act I to a most compelling life.
