John Lewis, who died aged 80 on July 17, fought all his lift for the poor and minorities and will be remembered as a civil rights movement icon.
On March 7, 1965, John was brutally attacked as he and other civil rights leaders marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, toward the State Capitol in Selma, Alabama. It remains one of the most notorious images of violent racism in the USA. He bore the scars of his fractured skull for his entire life—as does America. I first met John in 1980, when the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (NCCB) worked with him to spread the word of cooperatives to black leaders and communities. I was tasked with arranging John’s meetings across the USA and traveling with him throughout California. He was soft-spoken, a good listener and uniquely humble in everything he did. It was a wonderful, memorable journey.
The last time I saw him was on May 5, 2010, when I was being inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame. I thought we’d have about 10-15 minutes with John, but he gave us over an hour, speaking about the South and his life working with cooperatives, sharing some of his stories about the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. He told us the soul-stirring story of personally forgiving the white police officer who bludgeoned him on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The officer was dying of cancer and wanted to apologize for his actions and to be forgiven. John and the former officer had talked and then prayed together in the same room that we were in. Part of his funeral procession included transporting his casket across that same bridge. John Lewis will long be remembered for the person he was and the passions he held. Many will write of his character, his contribution to building a better America and his selflessness in pushing for change. He deserves every accolade and award he earned, and represents the best of America. He saw the future of our nation and did all he could to lead us there.
I will let others more capable than me sing his praises for a lifetime of service. What I want to focus on is his support for cooperatives. John always wanted cooperatives to build a better, fairer, and more diverse and equitable America. Here is a short chronology of that commitment. In 1958 he attended a weekend retreat at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. In his autobiography, Walking With the Wind, he writes that before going to Highlander, he knew a lot about the uniquely inter-racial Highlander Folk School and its lonely, brave work striving for social justice in the South. At that time, Highlander itself was a cooperative and taught its attendees about the development and use of cooperatives.
John wrote, “The single person who most impressed me that weekend was a woman—a 60-year-old organizer named Septima Clark.” On John’s Island, South Carolina, Clark worked with Esau Jenkins to teach black people on the island how to pass the rigid tests used to prevent them from obtaining the right to vote. This voter education was done secretly in the backroom of a food co-op that Esau and other black islanders had set up to help themselves. The program that started in the island’s little co-op store—called “The Progressive Club”—would go on to become the Citizenship School Program, whose 900 schools registered millions of blacks to vote in the South for the first time in their lives.
So, at the age of 18, John Lewis first came to understand the potential role of cooperatives.
Highlander was an influential school. Rosa Parks had attended in 1955 and was also influenced by Septima Clark. She later said, “I was 42-years-old and it was one of the few times in my life up to that point when I did not feel any hostility from white people… it was hard to leave.” But she did, and only months later, with her new-found confidence, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
At Highlander, John heard Guy Carawan sing the re-worded hymn, “We Shall Overcome,” first created by black composer Charles Tindley. And it was there that he first sat down for a meal at the same table with white people. It would be a seminal moment. “Of course, I left Highlander on fire,” John wrote. “That was the purpose of the place, to light fires, and to refuel those whose fires were already lit.”
In 1958 he attended a meeting at Spellman College in Atlanta on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation. There, Bayard Rustin taught him the tactics of pacifist resistance—who had already passed on his lessons to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King to use in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Bayard Rustin went on to organize the 1963 March on Washington from his apartment in a union-sponsored housing co-op in NYC.
At the same Spellman gathering, John met and was influenced by Ella Baker (1903-1986)—who, in my view, is the most unsung woman in the U.S. civil rights movement. In the 1930s, she was national director of the Young Negroes Cooperative League and was developing other cooperatives in Harlem and New York City. She taught young civil rights activist Bob Moses about co-ops and was later hired by the NAACP to teach about cooperatives across the country. Ella also attended meetings organized by the Cooperative League of the USA (Now NCBA) and was the first staff member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to work for Martin Luther King. Ella also wanted to lend her organizing skills to the young activists and volunteered to become the first staff member of the Southern Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1964 John was elected chair of SNCC; he was one of the Big Six who had represented the organizers of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The other five members were: James Farmer, head of the Congress on Racial Equality, CORE (who lived at the Chatham Green Co-op in NYC, which had been sponsored by credit unions); Martin Luther King (lifetime supporter of co-ops); A. Philip Randolph (writer about co-ops, who lived in the Dunbar Apartments, the first housing co-op for black people in NYC, and later lived in Penn South Co-op, NYC); Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP (who later joined the Parkway Village Housing Co-op in NYC); and Whitney Young (president of the Urban League, which organized housing and other co-ops).
From his co-op apartment in Penn South, Bayard Rustin hosted the first meeting of the group that would go on to organize the March. Rachelle Horowitz and Tom Kahn, who lived at the same co-op, were key members of the March staff. Norm Hill, who attended the meeting and worked on the march, later moved to the co-op, and still lives there today. During 1963, Rachelle put up many of the March volunteers at her Penn South Co-op apartment including Eleanor Holmes (now the non-voting Congress member for Washington, DC) and civil rights activists and sisters, Joyce and Dorie Ladner. In Walking With the Wind, John wrote about being in NYC just before the March and having Joyce Ladner, Tom Kahn and Eleanor Norton read over his speech—which would end up being the most contentious of the day. Roy Wilkins wanted it to be left out of the program, but others threatened to boycott the event if it were not read.
Rachelle told me in an interview that the hotel in NYC where John was staying had thin walls and John was practicing his speech there too loudly. The hotel manager asked John to practice his speech elsewhere or be evicted from the hotel. John asked Rachelle if he could come over to her apartment at the co-op to rehearse; she figured that the co-op’s thick brick walls would make a good sound curtain. Dorie, Joyce, and Eleanor were staying there, too, but after hearing endless forceful renditions of the speech the women eventually had to kick John out. They had already sent Bob Dylan—who had stayed there to rehearse his songs for the March and also took the opportunity to serenade Dorie Ladner—on his way).
A few days later, a 23-year-old John Lewis gave his speech to the nation from in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
In 1967 John Lewis joined the Southern Regional Council (SRC) in Atlanta, Georgia, as director of its Community Organization Project. His task was to establish co-ops, credit unions and community development groups in the Deep South. “This was hands-on work, and I loved it. I felt at home again, literally,” he wrote in his autobiography.
In 1978 President Jimmy Carter made him associate director of ACTION under Sam Brown (at one time also a board member of the NCCB). John’s staff included 125 people in 10 regional offices. The staff oversaw 5,000 Vista volunteers and over 230,000 elderly volunteers. “We tried to help them through a range of programs similar to those I had directed with the Southern Regional Council,” he wrote. “We helped form cooperatives in rural communities.”
In 1980 he joined the National Consumer Cooperative Bank (NCCB) as community relations director. NCCB president Carol Greenwald asked me to arrange tours for John of black communities in the U.S. where he could speak about the bank and its nonprofit arm as resources for cooperatives.
I had the honor of being on a two-week tour of California with him. We met many important black leaders: mayor Tom Bradley (Los Angeles), mayor Willie Brown (San Francisco), Assembly member—now Congress member—Maxine Waters, and state senator Diane Watson. They were all excited to see John and eagerly listened to the opportunities provided by the NCCB and its nonprofit arm. Bradley and Brown both later gave help to food co-ops assisted by the NCCB’s nonprofit arm.
In 1988 my wife Ann and I had hosted Eldridge Mathebula, a visitor from South Africa, whose organization, the Black Consumers Union, wanted to develop co-ops for black people in South Africa. At that time, under apartheid, only whites could develop and operate cooperatives in the country. Eldridge’s organization invited me to South Africa to give talks on what types of co-op could be organized and to work with government agencies on a pathway to legalize co-ops for black people. At the time, there was an international boycott of South Africa, which I did not want to break. John, by that time, was a Congress member representing Atlanta. I asked his advice on whether or not I should go, and in the end he felt I should. In his opinion, the opportunity was there to instigate black co-operatives as democratically run organizations. In a nation that barred black people from voting and political power, co-ops could be a nonviolent way to build a new society. In 1989, the Black Consumers’ Union registered the first black cooperative in South Africa.
Throughout this time, John was a good friend and champion of the Atlanta-based Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC). He spoke at FSC’s 50th Anniversary in Birmingham, Alabama, in 2017. The National Cooperative Business Association reported, “During a stirring speech at the awards ceremony, prominent civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) called cooperatives a ‘key strategy’ in the civil rights movement. Echoing Martin Luther King, Lewis urged audience members to keep their ‘eyes on the prize’ of achieving true and lasting equality, despite setbacks.”
In 2010, I met John Lewis for the last time and spoke with him about his life working with cooperatives. We have surely lost a champion, but honor a giant. He was the son of a sharecropper who went on to shape our conscience and our nation. We have a moment now in which to reflect on the unique opportunity John Lewis has given us to re-direct ourselves to the cooperative world that he wished us to create. It is time for cooperators to return to making “Good Trouble.”
