David Greenberg, Ph.D.
Professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University
David Blight, Ph.D.
Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
John Lewis: A Life
BONUS BOOK GIVEAWAY! We are giving away copies of John Lewis: A Life to randomly selected Zoom attendees. Details on the webinar registration page.
In John Lewis: A Life, award-winning historian and journalist David Greenberg, Ph.D., professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, presents new details in the life of a man who lived with courage and conviction, and who resisted hating those who hated him.
Born into poverty in rural Alabama, John Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he helped make into one of the major civil rights organizations. He may be best remembered as the victim of a vicious beating by Alabama state troopers at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he nearly died.
Greenberg’s biography traces Lewis’s life from his youth as a precocious bookworm who sought education and freedom in the Jim Crow era, through the post-Civil Rights years, when he headed the Voter Education Project, which enrolled millions of African American voters across the South. The book reveals the little-known story of his political ascent first locally in Atlanta, and then as a member of Congress. Tapped to be a part of the Democratic leadership in Congress, he earned respect on both sides of the aisle for the sacrifices he had made on behalf of nonviolent integration in the South and came to be known as the “conscience of the Congress.”
Thoroughly researched and dramatically told, Greenberg’s biography captures and conveys the power of Lewis’s surpassing courage and faith in nonviolence while also revealing him to be far more politically skilled, pragmatic, and canny than commonly thought.
Greenberg will be in conversation with renowned historian David Blight, Ph.D. (FAN ’19), Sterling Professor of History and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
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