dancing for the joy of every man
by Douglas Messerli
Dawn Porter (director) John Lewis: Good
Trouble / 2020
All those who saw or heard former President
Barack Obama’s moving eulogy at John Robert Lewis’ Atlanta funeral, will
already know many of the facts of Lewis’ life laid out in Dawn Porter’s
CNN-sponsored film, John Lewis: Good Trouble; specifically that growing
up as a child of Troy, Alabama sharecroppers that he desired even as a child to
become a man of words, preaching to the family chickens—a lot more responsive
to his ruminations, he later claimed, than human beings years after were to his
political statements—and that many a morning after breakfast he hid out under
the house porch so that he might escape work in the fields, racing down to the
road only when the school bus appeared.
Lewis, even as a boy, knew the direction in which he was headed; unlike
his brothers, he was determined to get an education, a desire which his parents
supported despite the help he might have provided them in their difficult
agrarian labors.
Obama also retold the stories of Lewis’ early involvement in the Civil
Rights Movement, to which the young Lewis turned after hearing a 1955 radio
broadcast by Martin Luther King, and his gradual desire to be trained in the
tactics of non-violent action.
We
know he was a very young man when he began to be involved in restaurant
sit-ins—where he and other young black men were verbally taunted and liquids
and food were tossed into their faces or poured on the top of heads with many
of the “sitters” roughed up—and soon after, in bus rides where he and his
colleagues, following the lead of Rosa Parks, proudly sat up front,
often being abused by the drivers and other passengers.
Even worse, the Birmingham Riders, as they were called, were beaten with
baseball bats, pipes, and other objects. Arrested by the police they were taken
across the border into Tennessee and released. After regrouping in order to
ride into Montgomery, they were met with yet further violence, Lewis’ head
being hit with a crate. “I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the
Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later commented.
Yet, despite our knowledge of some of these feats, Lewis brushed them
off as simply a way of getting into “good trouble” As Lewis later wrote:
"I met Rosa Parks when I was 17. I met Dr. King when I was 18. These two individuals inspired me to find a way to get in the way, to get into trouble. So I got into good trouble, necessary trouble.—"
Through Dawn Porter’s film we are visually reminded, moreover, of just
how young this thinly-framed, mustached, adolescent really was. With him, we
watch a reenactment by the waitress (still proud it appears) who first told him
he could not be served at the luncheon counter. And several times Porter
encourages the adult Georgia congressman, while viewing such images for the
first time since he had experienced them in person, to comment on his feelings
in that distant past.
As
film critic Cristy Lemire observes:
“Porter does not press Lewis on any issues or ask
him any uncomfortable questions. But she does offer him some moments of introspection.
In one of her more intriguing story-telling tactics, she has Lewis sit on a
sparse soundstage and review images from his own history—some of which he’d
never seen before—including non-violent protest training he imparted to fellow
African-Americans as they fought to integrate the South, suffering vicious
beatings in the process. She also has him look directly into the camera and
speak in a way that’s reminiscent of Errol Morris’ inter-
viewing style, and Lewis’ combination of warmth
and wisdom makes these statements particularly disarming.”
In
Porter’s film, moreover, we get images that help us to recognize just how
remarkable it was that leaders would choose the then 23-year-old Lewis to
become the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
just two years later would ask him and activist Hosea Williams to lead fellow
marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
Waiting for them at the end of that bridge were Alabama State Troopers
who briefly ordered them to disperse. The marchers dropped to their knees
briefly to pray, while without any further hesitation the police lobbed tear
gas canisters at them and began to beat them indiscriminately with their
nightsticks. Lewis’ skull was fractured and, once again, as he later reported,
he imagined that he was going to die. The rest of the marchers had no choice
but to retreat.
As
Obama retold the well-known horror story of “Bloody Sunday,” at Lewis’ funeral,
he added an important insight about that event. That evening, Obama suggests,
the troopers must have returned home believing they had won their cause,
perhaps celebrating it. But a short time later even a larger group of Civil
Rights protesters gathered, this time far overwhelming any police force that
might be gathered, successfully crossing the bridge and marching on to Montgomery.
Lewis could no longer join them, suffering still from the pain of his beating,
but he had become a symbol of the righteousness of their cause.
After that event Lewis claimed he had lost all fear of death, which
afforded an even greater freedom.
Much of the rest of the film—after Lewis chose to leave SNCC, in part
because of Stokely Carmichael’s election as a chairman who embraced the use of
violence as a means of self-defense—follows Lewis to congress where, as he
himself admits, he now stood on the other side of politics, no longer an
outsider but someone whose role was to work with others to make important
changes.
In
many of these attempts to correct what he saw as wrongs Lewis admittedly
failed, despite his continued efforts to get into “good trouble,” including his
arrestment for holding a sit-in in the House of Representatives. But as he grew
older, he increasingly came to be seen as the “conscience of Congress,” the man
who both impassionedly and calmly spoke out for the rights not only of blacks,
but of women, and of the LGBT community. He helped to pass provisions, after
long years of work, to create the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial along the
banks of National Mall’s tidal basin; and he fought hard for the construction
of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington,
D.C.’s mall.
Some of the loveliest scenes of this new John Lewis film takes us into
his own home where, with his now deceased wife, he had created a large
collection of mostly black art; and at his office, where during a birthday
celebration, the man who claims he cannot sing was moved by the cake his
assistants awarded him to perform a spontaneously lovely dance.
In
a real sense, that dance releases some of the deep seriousness and profundity
of this great man’s life which we have just reexperience, permitting him, for a
few seconds at least, to once more return to his true role as a joyful human
being, who somewhat absurdly preached not only to the chickens, but as his
sister insists, to his siblings as well. Lewis, it is clear, believed in the
deep humanity of all of us and lived his entire life attempting through words
and actions to actualize that fact, that we indeed are all equal in the eyes of
God and the State.
Having now lost this great voice, we need desperately to seek it out
again in others and, hopefully, within ourselves.
Los Angeles, August 12, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and Green
Integer Review (August 2020).
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