John Lewis and the Civil Rights Movement

01:090:293:H2
David Greenberg (History, Journalism & Media Studies)
M 2:00 - 5:00 PM
Van Dyck Hall (VD) 011

 

This class uses the life of John Lewis as a way to study the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis, who died in 2020, was a 19-year-old seminary student when he became involved in the 1960 sit-ins in Nashville— one of the events that kicked off a decade of activism and progress toward racial equality. Lewis was a central participant in many other events, including the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Selma campaign for voting rights. When the movement fractured in the late 1960s, Lewis turned to politics, first at the local level in Atlanta and then, starting in 1987, as a U.S. Congressman, where he fought for racial equality from inside the system. The course looks at both the events of John Lewis’s life and those of the movement, and the fate of his beliefs in freedom, equality, integration, nonviolence, and what he and others called “the Beloved Community.”