John Lewis once lost blood in the Charlotte area; decades later he found reconciliation
Long after John Lewis first arrived on that fateful bus ride, the Charlotte region remained a touchstone for him.
From his quiet reflections at a Charlotte museum and a Rock Hill lunch counter to his poignant recollections to reporters, Lewis always remembered the role the region played in his life and in civil rights history.
“Despite the stage and despite the platform ... he never forgot the Carolinas,” said WBTV’s Steve Crump, who produced four documentaries involving the late Georgia congressman.
Lewis, who died this month at 80, will lie in state in Georgia’s State Capitol Rotunda Wednesday. On Thursday a memorial service will be held at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist, the church once led by his friend, Martin Luther King Jr.
The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Lewis was just 20 when he joined Ella Baker, Julian Bond and dozens of other young African Americans for a conference at Raleigh’s Shaw University in 1960. There they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student arm of the burgeoning movement.
A year later he returned to the Carolinas aboard a Greyhound bus bound for New Orleans. The 13 original Freedom Riders were testing a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated interstate bus travel was unconstitutional.
On May 9, 1961, they arrived in Charlotte. One Black member of the group was arrested after going into a whites-only barbershop and asking for a shoeshine. That day the bus left for its next stop, Rock Hill.
At the Greyhound station there Lewis and his white seatmate, Albert Bigelow, tried to enter a white waiting room.
“We were met by an angry mob that beat us and left us lying in a pool of blood,” Lewis recounted to delegates at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. “Some police officers came up and asked us whether we wanted to press charges. We said no. We come in peace, love and nonviolence. We said our struggle was not against individuals but against unjust laws and customs.”
It was the first time blood was shed on the Freedom Ride. And it came days after the flight of the first American in space.
“I had no idea that history was being made up in space while I was being beaten in Rock Hill,” Lewis later told a reporter.
Lewis left the ride but rejoined it in Alabama. He would be beaten again in Montgomery.
In 1963, at 23, Lewis joined King and other speakers at the March on Washington. Two years later, in March 1965, he led hundreds of protesters over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in a march for voting rights. On what became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers cracked his skull with a billy club.
Reflecting decades later
In 2002, Lewis was touring an exhibit called ”Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers” at Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South. The exhibit recounted the economic and social changes of the region.
On the tour, he stopped in front of a vintage television screen showing a loop of raw network TV footage from Bloody Sunday. He watched himself being beaten and other marchers picking up a woman and carrying her to safety.
“He was just really quiet for a really long time and said, ‘I’ve seen clips but I’ve never seen the entire sequence before’,” recalled Emily Zimmern, the museum’s former president.
In 2008 Lewis found another occasion for reflection.
He was once again in Rock Hill to speak to the city’s annual Martin Luther King Day prayer breakfast. Lewis and then-Mayor Doug Echols were walking downtown when they passed the old McCrory’s dime store.
In 1961, nine Black students from Friendship College had sat at the store’s counter and ordered coffee, Cokes and hamburgers. They were arrested and refused bail. They started the Civil Rights movement’s “jail, no bail” strategy. A half-century later, Echols told Lewis the original stools and counter were still in the renovated building. Lewis walked in and sat on a stool.
“He sat down and put his hands on the counter and bowed his head and stayed that way for two minutes,” Echols told the Observer, choking up at the memory. “He just sat there and didn’t say anything. It was a touching moment really.”
At the next day’s breakfast, Echols apologized to Lewis for the 1961 beating.
“As a community, we can not erase that moment from our history, in the same way that Congressman Lewis cannot erase it from his memory,” Echols told the crowd.
A year later Lewis received another apology.
Elwin Wilson, a former Ku Klux Klan member, had been one of the men who beat Lewis at the Rock Hill bus station. In 2009, he traveled to Capitol Hill to tell Lewis he was sorry.
‘This one is Rock Hill’
Lewis made other trips to the Charlotte area.
In 2004 he was at Myers Park High School for a teleconference with Duke University historian John Hope Franklin for a program on school desegregation. The visit occasioned another trip to the Levine where he saw an exhibit called “Courage” about the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
Other visits came at the invitation of Gloria Kelley, who attended graduate school in Atlanta with Lewis’s wife, Lillian. Kelley brought Lewis first to Winthrop University and then to Central Piedmont Community College, where she is dean of libraries. At both schools he talked about the civil rights movement and his role in it. He always made an impression on students.
“To say ‘I met him, I shook his hand, and he was just like me’,” Kelley said this week. “When they can see him now in the news . . . you realize there are no limitations if you had a desire to help others.”
Walking out of CPCC’s Halton Theater that night in 2010, then-Observer reporter David Perlmutt asked Lewis if he had any scars from all the beatings he’d experienced. Lewis pointed to his head, which had visible indentations.
This one is Selma. This one Montgomery. This one Rock Hill, he said.
“When the congressman stopped to show me his scars, he did it with a smile and glint in his eye,” Perlmutt recalled this week. “Never the slightest trace of bitterness or anger. He wore those scars as badges of honor.”
In 2012, when Lewis recounted his Rock Hill Freedom Riders experience to a packed convention hall in Charlotte, tears were visible on the faces of many delegates.
Crump heard those stories many times. He interviewed Lewis in his Washington office and elsewhere for stories and documentaries. In 2015, he was in Selma when President Barack Obama joined 40,000 people in marking the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Lewis led the march, holding hands with Obama on one side and his wife Michelle on the other.
“To be in that crowd, it was riveting,” Crump recalled. “Thats one of those moments it’s hard to separate yourself as a journalist from someone who’s an admirer of this great man.”
