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.”
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.