His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

Martin Luther King Jr. used the power of forgiveness, as developed in the Judeo-Christian tradition, to inspire those in the civil rights movement to act in elevated ways that would win hearts and minds: We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good

The dead end of Just America is a tragedy. This country has had great movements for justice in the past and badly needs one now. But in order to work it has to throw its arms out wide. It has to tell a story in which most of us can see ourselves, and start on a path that most of us want to follow.

If Perkins, the Progressive turned New Dealer, spent her life addressing problems left behind by Greeley’s Civil War generation—corporate power, exploited labor, political corruption, poverty—Rustin spent his battling injustices that the New Deal generation didn’t address: racism, segregation, and the threat of militarism to world peace. No one in

No one, including President Johnson, foresaw America’s first loss of a war, any more than the day’s tear gas victims pictured Selma as the last great thrust of a movement built on patriotic idealism. It was a turning point. The tide of confidence in equal citizenship had swelled over decades to confront segregation as well as the Nazis, and would r