The course examines the life of Congressman John Lewis of Georgia (1940-2020) as a lens onto the struggle for racial equality in the postwar era. One of ten children born to poor farmers in rural Alabama, Lewis went to college in Nashville and became one of the leaders of the budding student movement. He was a central part of almost all of the civil rights movement’s main achievements in the 1960s, including the sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters, the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate travel in the South, the March on Washington, and the campaign for voting rights that culminated with his leadership of a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he was brutally beaten by state troopers. Lewis then went on to a career in politics, first running the Voter Education Project that organized Black Southerners to register to vote, then in the Carter administration and in Atlanta politics, and finally as the representative from Georgia’s Fifth District in the U.S. Congress, where he came to be known as the Conscience of the Congress.
Readings will consist of both scholarly and journalistic treatments of the above topics; documentary films from the 1960s and more recent times; and, where possible, outside speakers. Writing assignments will require original historical research into the issues that John Lewis took up in his long career as well as mastery of the weekly readings.
About Professor Greenberg
DAVID GREENBERG is a professor of History and of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and a frequent commentator in the national news media on contemporary politics and public affairs. He specializes in American political and cultural history. His most recent book, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (W.W. Norton, 2016) examines the rise of the White House spin machine, from the Progressive Era to the present day, and the debates that Americans have waged over its implications for democracy.
Prof. Greenberg’s first book, Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image (W.W. Norton, 2003) won the Washington Monthly Annual Political Book Award, the American Journalism History Award, and Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Award. Calvin Coolidge (Henry Holt), a biography for the American Presidents Series, was published in December 2006 and appeared on the Washington Post’s list of best books of 2007. Presidential Doodles (Basic Books, 2006) was widely reviewed and featured on CNN, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and CBS’s “Sunday Morning.”
Formerly a full-time journalist, Prof. Greenberg is now a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, where he writes a regular column. He previously served as managing editor and acting editor of The New Republic, where he was a contributing editor until the magazine’s death-in-all-but-name in 2014. Early in his career, he was the assistant to author Bob Woodward on The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (Simon & Schuster, 1994). He has also been a regular contributor to Slate since its founding and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Daedalus, Dissent, Raritan, and many other scholarly and popular publications.
His awards and honors include the Hiett Prize in 2008, given each year to a single junior scholar in the humanities whose work has had a public influence; a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence. He graduated from Yale, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his PhD from Columbia. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Suzanne Nossel, and their children, Leo and Liza.