Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: John Lewis, civil rights hero and longtime member of Congress  – what kind of lessons can we learn from his life as we face Trump’s return to the White House? His biographer David Greenberg will comment.  But first: abortion rights referenda won the votes of a lot of people who also voted for Trump.  How did that happen?  Amy Littlefield will comment–in a minute.
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How come abortion rights won big in this election, and so did the man who ended Roe v. Wade? Amy Littlefield spent election day in Amarillo, Texas to talk to people who voted to protect abortion rights and also voted for Trump. Amy is The Nation’s abortion access correspondent and a journalist who focuses on reproductive rights, healthcare, and religion. Her forthcoming book, American Crusaders, is a history of the anti-abortion movement over the last 50 years. It’ll be published in 2026. Amy, welcome back.

Amy Littlefield: It’s great to be back with you, Jon.

JW: Amarillo is in the Texas Panhandle. That’s the part that sticks up into Oklahoma. I drove through there once on a cross-country trip and stopped to see Cadillac Ranch. That’s the place where 10 Cadillacs are sticking out of the ground in a row, buried nose down. This was an art project from the 1970s of a group called Ant Farm. Is that why you picked Amarillo as the place to spend election day?

AL: That is not in fact the reason, Jon, although it could have been compelling. No, there was a different reason why I found myself in a room full of anti-abortion Trump supporters when things started to go south on election night, and when it became very clear that Trump was going to win the election. And in fact, I was looking at a lesser-known contest happening in Amarillo, Texas. But it is crucial that you say you drove through it. Okay. When I talked to people about Amarillo, Texas, right, the folks who are not from there, many of them have driven through it because Amarillo is a weigh station on the way to states where abortion remains legal. So it is a crucial checkpoint for Texans who are making their way out of the state of Texas, where of course abortion is banned, and into states where they can still obtain the procedure.

JW: Amarillo had its own version of an abortion rights referendum.

AL: That’s exactly right. So Amarillo was this really interesting local battleground for abortion. Of course, as we know, abortion was on the ballot in 10 states this election, which is a record number, but there’s this lesser-known city ballot initiative. So Amarillo is a really interesting case. This is a city that’s known as the buckle of the Bible belt. It’s an extremely conservative part of the country. If you drove through there, I’m sure you saw as I did, many, many white crosses, and signs for churches by the side of the road. This is an area that went overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, and yet they had this ballot initiative that had to do with this campaign called Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn. This is an anti-abortion activist named Mark Lee Dickson, who has succeeded in getting many cities, mostly in Texas to pass ordinances restricting abortion within city limits.
Now, you’ll recall from the years before the Roe v. Wade, the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that Mark was able to get these ordinances passed with a civil bounty hunter enforcement mechanism, right? It was a ban on abortion that would be enforced by neighbors suing neighbors and not by government officials. And using this civil enforcement mechanism, which was devised by an attorney named Jonathan Mitchell, the state of Texas was able to ban abortion at six weeks before Roe v. Wade fell. And so this is sort of the same team. Mark Lee Dickson is out there. He’s this ambassador traveling around Texas peddling these anti-abortion ordinances. And the latest iteration of the ordinance that Mark is trying to pass would essentially have banned people from helping someone travel through Amarillo to get an abortion elsewhere. It would have tried to prevent someone from helping a resident of Amarillo leave the city and get an abortion somewhere else.
It had a provision that tried to revive the 1873 Comstock Act. This is this anti-vice law that anti-abortion operatives are trying to revive in order to impose a de facto nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills. And so Mark Lee Dickson had sort of rolled all of these different anti-abortion provisions into this ordinance, and his supporters had gotten it onto the ballot in Amarillo. Interestingly, they’d had to put it on the ballot because the Amarillo City Council refused to go along with it, and they had rejected this ordinance, and so it was going to be put to voters on election day. And so that is why I found myself besides the Cadillacs, that was why I found myself in Amarillo, Texas on election day.

JW: Just to cut to the chase here, how did this initiative to stop people from leaving or traveling through Amarillo to get an abortion by deputizing private citizens to stop them, how did this do on election day?

AL: Jon it failed resoundingly. 59% of voters in the buckle of the Bible belt, in the heart of Trump country rejected this initiative.

JW: You went to Amarillo really to talk to people, especially the people heading into polling places in Amarillo to find out what they were thinking about this initiative and about Trump and politics. Your Nation report is a fascinating account of what some people in Amarillo think about this. I thought Dexie Organ was pretty interesting.

AL: Dexie Organ. I feel like my next book should be about Dexie Organ. She is a world unto herself, right? So Dexie Organ, I met in the parking lot outside of a polling station in Amarillo, Texas on a bright sunny day. She pulled up in a beat-up Nissan. She got out of her car, and she came over to a volunteer who was working with the campaign to defeat this anti-abortion initiative, a woman named Diann Anderson, who was this spunky grandma who was out there in Ugg boots holding up a sign that said, ‘Vote No on Prop A.’ And Dexie came over to Diann and said, “I need a little education.” And so Diann explained to her that Proposition A was in her words, “An abortion travel ban.” Right. That this would be deputizing private citizens to sue anyone they suspected of helping someone travel through Amarillo to get an abortion out of state.
And Dexie said, “You know what? That’s unconstitutional.” She told me — I talked to her after she went in and voted — she said, “We’re women. I don’t know why they think they need to suppress us.” She told me she had eight daughters. She also has six sons. 14 kids. And she was thinking about them.  And I said to her, “Dexie, people might be surprised to hear that someone who has 14 kids is voting this way.” She said, “Well, I’ve also had an abortion.” She’s in the high number of people across this country in all corners of this country who have also had an abortion. So she went inside and she cast her vote against the anti-abortion ordinance and in favor of Donald Trump.

JW: And it turns out she was hardly alone. Abortion rights passed in states that Trump carried. In Arizona, the abortion rights initiative got 61%. Kamala Harris got 47%. In Nevada, the abortion rights initiative got 64%; Kamala Harris got 47%. In Montana, the abortion rights initiative got 58%; Kamala got 38%, a 20-point difference.
You asked people who voted both for abortion rights and for Trump why, why they did it. What did they tell you?

AL: Dexie Organ in particular, right, let’s start with her. She had doubts about Kamala Harris, and again, she was voicing that she doesn’t want people to suppress women, in her words, right. And yet, and she said, “I would like to see a woman president,” but she didn’t think Kamala Harris was the one. She told me she didn’t think she was strong enough to lead, that with the foreign wars going on, that men in leadership roles would, in her words, “Annihilate us.” And so there was this sort of internalized sexism, possibly having to do with the fact that Kamala Harris was a Black woman, although she didn’t vocalize that to me.
And then the other thing was she, like most of the folks I spoke with in Amarillo on election day, really cared about the economy over everything else. She told me, “Our country’s in ruins financially.” She thought Trump was going to help with that. She told me she was working three jobs. She’s a certified nurse midwife, but she also waits tables, and she had a side hustle breeding dogs.
I heard over and over again from folks who were worried about the state of the economy. And on top of that, there was this incredible sleight of hand that Donald Trump was able to pull off this election, which is that he was able to bring along with him, his supporters in the anti-abortion movement, who gave this man credit for overturning Roe v. Wade. And he was able to even at times, brag about overturning Roe v. Wade. And then he was able to muddy the waters with his messaging to such a degree that many voters, including Dexie Organ, saw his position on abortion–again, the position of the man who overturned Roe v. Wade–as a moderate position.

JW: And what made this moderate?

AL: Well, she told me that she was okay with Trump’s position because he ‘gave it to the states.’ Now, she lives in a state where abortion is banned. Texas has among the harshest anti-abortion policies in the country. And so Trump had managed, by saying he was going to veto a nationwide abortion ban, and journalists kept asking him about this idea of a nationwide abortion ban. When of course we know the 1873 Comstock Act is on the books. Project 2025 calls for reviving it without passage of any law because they say it’s already there to shut down access to the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. But nevertheless, it seems like a large number of voters fell for this idea that by ‘handing it back to the states,’ which is what the Supreme Court claimed it was doing, the Dobbs decision was somehow a middle ground.

JW: And what was the campaign to vote ‘No’ on this anti-abortion initiative in Amarillo? What was that campaign like? What was their argument?

AL: First of all, they were an incredibly vibrant campaign, right? This is a group of women who live in Amarillo who noticed that this nationally known anti-abortion activist, Mark Lee Dickson, was coming to town. They got organized. A few of them early on snuck into a meeting. One of them put down her hair to cover her tattoos, and they went in, and they listened to what he had to say, and they got organized, and they used very clever messaging that was targeted toward people in Amarillo. And Jon, the signs that I saw them using outside this polling place in Amarillo, I feel like could have come right out of the National Rifle Association. This was such conservative messaging. They were saying things like, ‘Say no to government overreach,’ ‘Defend our Constitution.’ And I had this weird moment where there’s a sign that said, “Defend our Constitution” – that was the pro-choice sign.
And then nearby there’s a sheriff’s SUV parked in the parking lot that says, “Randall County Sheriff — defending the Constitution.” So I was like, okay. The abortion rights campaign has the same messaging as local law enforcement here in Amarillo, Texas.
There was The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe did some reporting from Amarillo and shadowed some of the canvassers, and they were joking about this door hanger they had that they called ‘the conservative hanger,’ and it said, “Protect Your Rights,” with an eagle and a quotation from the governor, Greg Abbott, that said, “If you want to start a fight with Texans, just try taking away their freedom.” Of course, Abbott is anti-abortion, but they used this basically libertarian messaging to convince people that what they called an abortion travel ban that would deputize private citizens to go after people helping other people travel was an instance of overreach and a violation of the Constitution. And here in Amarillo, in the buckle of the Bible belt, it’s possible that was the only way to win, and it certainly paid off.

JW: So the idea that government wants to take away your freedom, the Reaganite message, won the day for abortion rights in Amarillo — and probably lots of other Republican states too. Of course, there is an alternative argument. We want a strong government to protect our freedom from the groups that would take it away from us. Did you see that argument any place?

AL: This is the devil’s bargain of this messaging. And you mentioned the Reagan era. And so I think it’s important to note the history here, that this strategy of abortion rights groups using this conservative or libertarian messaging around government overreach dates back to the 1980s, Will Saletan writes about it in his book Bearing Right about how pro-choice campaigners convened these focus groups, figured out how to use messaging to defeat anti-abortion policies in states like Arkansas, that was basically taking on this conservative frame. And we’ve seen echoes of that in other states, right. So Missouri, the campaign to enshrine a right to abortion until viability in the state constitution succeeded there. Although of course, at the same time, we saw Republican victories in that state. They used the name ‘Missourians for Constitutional Freedom.’ ‘Kansans for Constitutional Freedom’ had used that same name to defeat an anti-abortion initiative there in 2022.
And I remember shadowing canvassers in Kansas, and some of the voters who would open the door were so kind of confused by the name and the messaging that at first, they weren’t sure—“which side are you on of this issue?” Until they were like, “yeah, yeah, we’re for abortion rights.” And so I think there was this very intentional, and not necessarily new – Amarillo may have been sort of an extreme example of it, but in Florida, for example,’ Floridians Protecting Freedom,’ which came very close to enshrining abortion and the Constitution in Florida, they tried to capitalize on anger over government overreach as it related to Covid in the state.
And in fact, their internal talking points had told supporters not to attack Republicans directly. And so I think one of the reasons why we are seeing this disconnect where abortion rights continue to be extremely popular and continue to win by and large, and yet it doesn’t translate into victories for Democrats, I think one reason, right, there’s a million reasons, and we’re going to spend years unpacking exactly why. But I think one reason is that the conservative messaging used by some of these campaigns sort of gave voters like Dexie Organ a permission slip to feel like they could vote for abortion rights and also vote for Republican candidates.

JW: Big picture here, the Democrats had hopes that putting abortion on the ballot would turn out more women voters and more votes for Democrats. But that didn’t work mostly because of white women. 53% of white women nationally voted for Trump, which is, this is according to the exit polls, which is almost exactly the same as last time. There is a very interesting political group called Galvanize Action that you’ve written about for The Nation. Their purpose was to win moderate white women for the Democrats in the blue wall states with carefully tested TV ads, and they were especially concerned about something you mentioned, the internalized sexism of a lot of working-class white women who call themselves moderates.
They said that they consider their husbands more politically informed than they were. They lacked confidence in their own political knowledge, their own political agency. They worried as your friend Dexie did, that a woman president would not be a strong leader. So in a way, this is a response to the fascist appeal. A strong man will protect you from the evil in the world. I know you sat in on some focus groups of this group Galvanize Action. What was that like?

AL: Yeah, I mean, I sat in on some of the focus groups in mid-October, three of the focus groups, and one of them was women who were moderate white women who were leaning conservative. And, fascinatingly, they seemed to feel like abortion was not a very important issue to them. They seemed to care more about the economy, of course, but also about immigration. There was one member of the group who had heard a story about a woman who had a paper clip placed in her rearview mirror, and somehow this was about immigrants trying to kidnap people, but I couldn’t find any evidence that this wasn’t completely made up. But there was this sort of fixation on immigration and this, I mean, women in this group were saying, some of them were older, they were saying, ‘maybe abortion would’ve been important to me 10 years ago, but it’s not important to me any more.’
There were two other groups I sat in on that were leaning more toward Harris. And for those folks, abortion rights were very important. And not just abortion rights, but they really felt like ‘Trump, my gosh, what is the future for women if Trump gets elected?’ They were worried about their daughters and worried about the future and seeing a connection between abortion rights and democracy. So all of that was out there in this wide universe of white women.
I came out of these focus groups, and probably in retrospect, because two of the three of the ones that I happened to observe were leaning towards Harris, feeling hopeful that white women were going to be outraged enough over the end of the 50-year nationwide right to legal abortion, that they would end their loyalty to the Republican Party, that they would end their loyalty to Trump. And that seems not in fact to have happened.
And so I know for many of us out there, this election felt like a referendum on the personhood of women. And the fact that many white women went for the bargain offered by the Republican Party, which was, I mean, you remember Trump standing up there saying, “I’m going to protect women whether they like it or not.” To me, that was such an encapsulation of the bargain that patriarchy offers to white women – which is like, ‘we will protect you from Black and brown men. We will protect you from immigrants.  We’ll protect you from people at the border.  But we’re going to need your submission in return.’ And it seems like a decent percentage of the white female population in this country went along with that bargain yet again, even though their own rights had just been eviscerated.

JW: Amy Littlefield – she’s The Nation’s abortion access correspondent. You can read her report on Amarillo and on Galvanize Action at thenation.com. Amy, thanks for talking with us today.

AL: Thank you, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: How can we hold on to hope for the future when Trump is about to become president again? “Hope,” Rebecca Solnit says, “does not come from knowing the future. It comes from knowing the past–from knowing that people stood up against injustice and oppression. They lived lives of courage and perseverance during dark times.”
For example, John Lewis: he started out taking a stand against the violence of white supremacy in the South in the ‘60s. He spent his last years standing against Trump, and for Black Lives Matter. And now we have a wonderful new biography of John Lewis, written by David Greenberg. He teaches history, and journalism and media studies, at Rutgers. His first book made him famous. It’s my favorite book about Nixon. It’s called Nixon’s Shadow: The History of An Image. He’s formerly a full-time journalist. Now he writes for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Dissent. He’s received many awards and fellowships for his writing. We reached in today at his office at Rutgers. David Greenberg, welcome to the program.

David Greenberg: Well, thank you, Jon. Thanks for having me.

JW: John Lewis started out changing America in 1960 with the sit-in movement at lunch counters in the South. He and his friends had just astonishing courage and commitment facing the violence of white supremacy. But who was John Lewis before that?

DG: John Lewis’s story, I found, is truly remarkable. I mean, he came from such adversity, dirt poor poverty, one of 10 children on a farm in rural Alabama. His parents had been sharecroppers. They scraped together enough to buy their own plot of land, but were often in debt, had to work hard picking cotton, corn, peanuts. They took extra jobs: his mother as a domestic washwoman, his father driving a bus. And he also grew up under the boot of Jim Crow.

JW: He says that hearing a preacher on the radio changed his life. Who was that?

DG: Well, that was Martin Luther King. John Lewis was born in 1940. So as a young teenager, 14, 15 years old, he’s listening to the local Montgomery, Alabama station and hears a sermon from King. He’s a reader. He follows the news. So very quickly, he’s following the events of the Montgomery bus boycott that catapulted King to national and international fame and decides that he wants to model his life after Martin Luther King. King becomes his inspiration, his model, and eventually his mentor.

JW: John Lewis was not one of the first four young activists who sat in at that Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro on February 1st, 1960. That seemed spontaneous, but there’s a little-known history leading up to that moment, preparing the ground, getting ready. John Lewis was part of that. Please explain.

DG: Right. Well, we all know the story of Greensboro as the first of the sit-ins, but it’s a bit ironic because they, in a way, jumped the gun. And in Nashville, where John Lewis was attending seminary, he and other people who become prominent in the movement, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, they’ve been organizing for months, and it was just kind of a matter of happenstance that they had not yet in early 1960 staged their own sit-ins, but they were ready to go.

So once the news of Greensboro reaches Nashville, this rather large, well-organized, and well-disciplined group, the Nashville group, they were trained by a minister–he was then just a divinity student at Vanderbilt named James Lawson–and others like Kelly Miller Smith, Metz Rollins. These were all ministers in the King mold devoted to nonviolence, the social gospel tradition. And they’ve prepared a group of students who are ready to go and do sit-ins, not just once, but an ongoing basis throughout that spring. And the Nashville story of success that spring where they get an agreement to desegregate from Woolworth’s and McClellan’s and some of these other downtown lunch counters is really one of the biggest success stories of that spring of 1960.

JW: Their organization was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. It was such a magnificent and heroic group. How do you describe SNCC to young people today? How do you explain their courage and commitment?

DG: This younger generation, having grown up under Jim Crow, but also in a time of growing prosperity. I mean, John Lewis was very poor, but some came from middle class families. These remember were college students and they decided they weren’t having it anymore.
And it was really the training in nonviolence, the Gandhian teachings that convinced a lot of people, I mean especially John Lewis, who I think took these beliefs as deep into his person as anyone who found the courage so that when you were hit, when you were slugged, when you were kicked, you would not fight back.
And this was a radical tactic, a radical philosophy that really helped galvanize the rest of the nation. People would look at the violence being perpetrated on these young men and women, whether it was violence by the local police or by local thugs and vigilantes who were knocking them off their lunch counter stools. And people looked at this and their sympathies went with these Black protestors, often Black and white protestors because in the national group, in particular – it was an integrated movement.

JW: Summer 1964–that was Mississippi Freedom Summer.  It began with the murders that people of my generation will never forget: Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Neshoba County. The three had just started working on voter registration in Mississippi with SNCC. The chairman of SNCC was John Lewis. What did he do?

DG: He rushes to Mississippi. He’s driving around with Bob Moses and Charlie Cobb and others looking for these bodies as if somehow, they’re going to find them on their own.

JW: Yeah, his line was, “How could three young Americans be killed in America for only wanting to register other Americans to vote?”

DG: Yeah. The voting drive in Mississippi, it’s somewhat successful in terms of the numbers, but it’s much more successful in the attention it directs to Mississippi, which really was the most entrenched in its suppression of Black voting, of Black autonomy, of Black freedom. It puts this problem of the segregation at the heart of the Democratic Party front and center for America to see.

JW: ‘65 was the Selma to Montgomery march, which started out at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It became a turning point in the history of civil rights in America, and would be emblematic in the later life of John Lewis. But you recreate its meaning and significance. The first time we heard the name ‘Edmund Pettus Bridge’ was Sunday, March 7th, 1965; we call it ‘Bloody Sunday.’

DG: This is a campaign for voting rights that’s been in the works for many years. SNCC has first gotten involved as far back as 1963. And in late 1964, after being frustrated by the tyrannical local sheriff, Jim Clark, and a crony of his, who’s a judge that has basically prevented any of the Selma activists from meeting in groups larger than three, they invite in Martin Luther King and the SCLC, his organization.
Things escalate. There is a young man named Jimmy Lee Jackson who’s killed by the police after one protest march. This gets Lewis and his friends from SCLC, a lot of the Nashville folks have now gone to work for King, upset to the point where they decide, “We need to stage a massive march from Selma all the way to the state capitol in Montgomery.” The idea is something like Gandhi’s march to the sea. It’s really going to be epic and dramatic.
Well, the first day they attempt it, SNCC, which has been feuding with SCLC, declines to march. So a few people from SNCC, including John Lewis of course, are participating. Lewis is at the head of the line with a man named Hosea Williams representing SCLC. They are ready to march out of town and begin their way to Montgomery when they’re confronted not only by Sheriff Clark and his posse, but George Wallace’s state troopers, who tell them to desist and turn around.
John Lewis asked for a moment to pray, but before they can even get down to pray, the sheriff’s posse and the state troopers descend on them, beating them, horse whipping them, not only John Lewis, but elderly women; and anyone can die, as people are fleeing running back to Brown Chapel. Lewis is badly beaten. He’s hospitalized. I actually found footage rarely, if ever seen before, of Lewis talking to reporters from his hospital bed that day. But what’s he talking about? Nonviolence.  The importance of nonviolence.
But those images, both the newspaper photos and also nightly news footage of Lewis’s beating and of the violence at Selma, again, have the effect of getting people throughout America to pay attention, to care, to put pressure on Lyndon Johnson to finally unveil a voting rights bill.

JW: And after years of organizing, after decades of work by activists, Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Why was that such a huge event in American history?

DG: What you have to understand is that after the Civil War, we amended the Constitution to guarantee the right to vote regardless of race. So there were those years in Reconstruction, the late 19th century, where many Blacks indeed could vote throughout the South. But then we had the so-called Redeemer governments and the regime of Jim Crow and this ruthless segregation descended, and Blacks were systematically deprived of the vote in really – in flagrant violation of the Constitution. And I think people know of methods like the poll taxes and the so-called literacy tests that were used as well as just outright violence, fear, and intimidation to keep Blacks from even registering to vote, let alone voting.
So the Voting Rights Act was finally the bill that was going to put teeth in methods of enforcements to really make good on that 100-year-old promise that Blacks, like any other citizens, could exercise their vote freely in the South. And once it passed and Blacks did begin to register, and Blacks did begin to vote, it really transformed the face of politics throughout the South and then throughout America.

JW: Then–just a footnote here–in 2013, the Shelby County decision of the Supreme Court, written by John Roberts, eviscerated the enforcement section of the Voting Rights Act. And we’ve been living in the shadow of that ever since.

DG: John Lewis saw that coming. In 2005, he testified against the confirmation of John G. Roberts as chief justice of the United States because, having seen Roberts’ memos when he was a Justice Department official under Reagan, Lewis knew that this man was no friend of the Voting Rights Act. Alas, his warnings were not heeded.

JW: In the spring of 1966 comes a watershed transformation of SNCC. John Lewis leaves SNCC. Stokely Carmichael becomes the head of SNCC. SNCC asks its white members to leave to organize white people. The news portrayed this as a change of heart from support for integration, to support for kind of Black autonomy around the slogan, Black Power.
When John Lewis leaves SNCC, he’s been arrested 40 times, you report. He’d been beaten countless times. He spent 31 days in Parchman Penitentiary, the worst place in the South. What did it mean to John Lewis to leave SNCC?

DG: It really was devastating for him. I mean, he had given his life to the movement. He was only 26 years old, an astonishing rise to national prominence and prominence in the movement. And again, he believed so deeply not just in the cause of integration and anti-discrimination, but also in the teachings of nonviolence. And so for him, not only to leave SNCC, but to see it go in this radically different direction was devastating to him. And he’s really at sea for a couple of years. He goes to work for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968. And so he’s searching for a new path through which he continues to fight for racial equality, Black freedom, all these things he believes in. Ultimately, it is in politics that he finds the arena for his second act.

JW: And it’s in 1986 that really the next major phase of his life begins. He ran for Congress for an open seat in Atlanta. His opponent was another former SNCC leader, Julian Bond, one of the co-founders of SNCC along with John Lewis. The two of them had the same politics, but very different backgrounds.

DG: Indeed. And he was not just another SNCC leader.  They were the best of friends. Bond, as you suggest, came from a well-to-do kind of Black elite. His father was an esteemed educator and college president.  In his youth Bond would meet people like Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson. So a very different background. And when John Lewis moves to Atlanta in 1963 as the chair of SNCC, it’s Julian Bond who teaches him things like how to order in a fancy restaurant or what a mixed drink is. They’re really close friends. When they get married, their wives become friends. They take family vacations together.
By 1986, John Lewis had run for Congress once in 1977 for the seat that Andrew Young had held and vacated. He lost, but came in a creditable second, so he thought, “Okay, the seat’s opening again. I’ll give it another shot.”
Julian Bond, who had fought a heroic battle to get seated in the Georgia legislature, had been serving in the legislature and then the state Senate for many years, he thought his time had come. And these two men, John Lewis was very humble and self-effacing, but he could also be very stubborn. And Lillian, his wife, also encouraged him not to always be stepping aside for Julian or for someone else.
Julian was dashing, handsome, witty, a silver-tongued speaker. All of elite Atlanta, Black and white, was lining up behind him, and Lewis was really the underdog. I mean, today, John Lewis looms so large as a cultural icon we forget back then it was Bond. He was hosting SNL. He was doing movies with Sidney Poitier or Richard Pryor. He was the big celebrity.
But two things happened. One, Lewis just worked harder. He always had been a hard worker. Someone who got up early, worked till late at night. So whether he’s at the factory gates at dawn or in the aisles of the 24-hour convenience stores at midnight shaking hands, he’s getting every vote.
The other thing that happens is Julian Bond, unfortunately, has a pretty serious cocaine habit. And this is an open secret in certain parts of Black Atlanta or elite Atlanta circles. John Lewis doesn’t want to raise the issue, but when it gets down to the runoff where it’s the two men, Bond with a significant lead in the polls still, Bond challenges Lewis to a series of debates, and Lewis’s campaign managers are telling him, “You got to use this.” This is going negative, but they also say, “Look, the people of Atlanta have a right to know if their elected representative has a serious drug problem.”
Lewis holds back, but then in one of the debates, Bond goes after Lewis on some kind of flimsy ethics charge. And no one is more ethical than John Lewis, and this gets his dander up. And so he says, “Julian, I think we should both go take a drug test.”
And this was the summer of “Just Say No.” Drugs are listed as the number one issue by most voters. Ronald Reagan publicly announces he’s going to have his whole cabinet take drug tests. So this is something that’s in the air, Lewis isn’t inventing it. But this is one of the factors that helps propel Lewis to a surprise upset on election day. It also, of course, severs the friendship. Julian is unforgiving.
I did find in my research that toward the end of Julian’s life, Julian died about seven years before John Lewis, there were some beginnings of a rapprochement. It wasn’t pure hostility, but the friendship was never the same.

JW: So in 1986, when John Lewis won his seat in Congress, Reagan was halfway through his second term as president. And American politics had been transformed in the previous six years. Remember, Reagan argued in his inaugural address, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Reagan had gotten almost 61% of the vote when he ran for reelection two years before John Lewis won. But two years after that, in the midterms of a second term, the year that John Lewis was elected, the Democrats retook both the House and the Senate–even though the incumbent president had won 61% of the vote two years earlier. That’s something we might remember today.
But what was it like for John Lewis to become a member of Congress in this context? Movement politics is very different from congressional politics. He was there starting with Reagan, but then George Bush, Sr., then Bill Clinton, then George W. Bush, then Obama.

DG: Right. Well, Lewis has made his bet that politics is where he can now make a difference. One thing I discovered in the book was how much Bayard Rustin was also a mentor to John Lewis. And right at that moment of the mid ’60s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Rustin writes an article called From Protest to Politics, where he says, “The way to continue to make change for Black Americans is to go into elective politics, to run for office, to get engaged.” And Lewis very much believes in this. He’s actually one of many civil rights veterans who seek out elective office.
He also realizes and comes to learn that politics requires a somewhat different set of skills from activism. At times, he will use the tricks, the tools of activism in his political battles, whether it’s staging a sit-in on the House floor as he does at one point, or fighting with nonviolent protests in Atlanta, the attempt to build a road through a historic neighborhood. But he also knows politics has its own set of codes, its own set of rules. And he becomes quite adept. For example, when he goes negative against Julian, however people judge that, he learns it’s important to compromise. That fierce, uncompromising side that he often showed in the movement gets softened as he realizes, “Let’s get a bill where I can support two-thirds of it rather than no bill at all.”
And most of all, he learns to leverage his moral authority. He becomes known in Congress; he becomes to be called the conscience of the Congress. And the luster and the heroism from those civil rights years attaches to him. And so especially as he gets older, younger, newer members look to him, “How should I vote on this issue? What’s John Lewis doing? If he puts his name to a bill, that’s going to help it get passed.” So he becomes very canny about using his moral authority as political leverage.

JW: I’m pretty sure you didn’t plan it this way, but your biography of John Lewis was published just a few weeks before Trump won re-election. So now we have to ask, what kind of lessons can we learn from the life of John Lewis and from his engagement with Trump in Trump’s first term to hold onto hope at this moment when we no longer have John Lewis?

DG: Yeah. In a way, I think he can still give us hope. There’s a story I recount in the book right after Trump’s election the first time. A woman is feeling just beside herself, despondent. She’s walking through the Atlanta airport. She sees, getting a shoeshine up on the pedestal, John Lewis–he’s in the Atlanta Airport all the time. He steps off, comes down, gives her a hug, and she says, as she tells the reporter, “I knew then that I would make it through, that we would be okay.” And you have lots of stories like that. John Lewis’ memoir returns to the bestseller list. He becomes kind of the anti-Trump or an antidote to Trump. He offers hope, he offers solace.
And perhaps most important, he reminds us that we have been through this and indeed worse, that perseverance and courage and determination can topple the barriers of racism and segregation and can lead us to a better place. The fight may never be resolved, it may never be over, but I think John Lewis does offer that kind of inspiration and a reminder that the fight can continue.

JW: David Greenberg–he’s the author of John Lewis: A Life. David, thanks for this magnificent book, and thanks for talking with us today.

DG: Thank you, Jon. It was my pleasure.