At 80, John Lewis Continues His Audacious Pursuit of the American Beloved Community

Congressman John Lewis realized long ago the importance of how Black voices shape American Democracy. (Photo Credit: The New Yorker)

By Kevin C. Peterson

Along the cragged lines of race and democracy the gradients of fairness and justice have always been muted by the thick fog of that unbounded American pursuit of power and greed, which is the child of unmannered capitalism.

The American story — which is said to be a story as much about our high civic ideals and conquests as it is a tale of ugly domination and ill-formed democracy — is decidedly complicated. The presence of the American black within that historical narrative lends that storyline distinct elements of contradiction and possibility.

We need not argue about the stunning impact that the American black has had on the development of our nation’s civic ideals. It is precisely because blacks were at the center of the Constitutional debates in Philadelphia that our democracy has taken the shape it now has. It was the African body — scarred and draped in chains from its transport across the Atlantic — that gave the so-called Founding Fathers so much consternation and caused the great arguments over our nation’s original political theories. That debate waged for centuries with blacks, such as Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth, weighing-in heavily about how our nation’s perceptions about race had muddied our concepts of…