John Lewis' Drafts

What the revision process for the late Congressman's March on Washington speech can tell us about advocacy today.

We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles?” The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?

—from John Lewis’ undelivered first draft of his “March on Washington” speech (1963)

I just started reading a great book called Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History, by Jeff Nussbaum. The premise is killer: these are newly-uncovered or little-known speeches that were written for or by major public and historical figures, but not delivered (for example: the speech Nixon would have given if he refused to resign).

The book starts with a major bang, an analysis of the late John Lewis’ speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (the same 1963 event which featured Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous— and deliberately mischaracterized— “I Have a Dream” speech).

Nussbaum thoroughly explores the context around Lewis’ speech— and, in particular, the pressure from other event organizers to pull back on some of the fiery rhetoric in Lewis’ original draft. At the time, Lewis was twenty-three at the time, and the new head of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).

As Lewis would later explain in a PBS interview on the fiftieth anniversary of the March (at which time he was the only one of the “Big Six” march organizers still living),

Well, all over the the American South, there had been hundreds and thousands of arrests. People had been beaten, jailed, some people had died in the Struggle. We had met with President Kennedy, six of us, the so-called Big Six… I was very young. I grew up very poor in rural Alabama, and growing up I saw those signs that said, “White men,” “Colored men,” “White women,” “Colored women,” “White waiting,” “Colored waiting,” and I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great grandparents, “Why?”.

They would say, “That’s the way it is. Don’t get in the way, don’t get in trouble.”

Well, when I was fifteen years old, in 1955, I heard of Rosa Parks. I heard the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., on our radio. The actions of Rosa Parks, the words and leadership of Dr. King, inspired me. I was deeply inspired. I wanted to do something. I wanted to bring down those signs.

Lewis said President Kennedy, during the meeting with the Big Six, was initially against the March, worried about violence. Organizers promised a nonviolent protest, but Kennedy was still concerned.

The Big Six met again and decided to invite four major white leaders. Nussbaum explains that in particular Lewis’ speech was revised to prevent one of those leaders— Catholic Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle— from withdrawing his participation in the event. If O’Boyle dropped out, it might make things more difficult with the President.

Later during the PBS interview, Lewis says of his speech,

I felt that I had to be tough. I had to deliver a speech that reflected the feelings, the views of the young people. And also the views and the feelings of the people that was struggling in the Black Belt of Alabama, in Southwest Georgia, in the Delta of Mississippi… It is true that I did have a line in the [original draft of the] speech which said, in effect, “If we do not see meaningful progress here today, the day will come when we will not confine our marching on Washington, but we may be forced to march through the South the way Sherman did— [but] nonviolently”.

I would argue that the speech Lewis eventually gave is a masterclass in balancing competing goals and interests while maintaining the essential rhetorical purpose and character of the author, and it’s definitely worth watching in its own right:

His tone is impassioned and defiant, full of specific examples— another potential improvement over the first draft of the speech— and focused on the hope for meaningful change without any pretense that the change is either here already, or guaranteed. Lewis’ opening line in both versions of the speech is, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of.”

But Lewis had listened to the other organizers— especially A. Phillip Randolph and Dr. King, Lewis’ mentor— and had excised and changed some elements from the original draft. The references to Sherman were now gone, and Lewis now mentioned marching through Northern as well as Southern cities. As Nussbaum points out, whereas in the original draft Lewis had written, “This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations: This bill will not protect the citizens in Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state,” in the delivered version he changed the ending of the sentence to of a police state, making it more ambiguous.

In my experience, this is how advocacy works in the real world, and the balance is extremely hard— perhaps impossible— to consistently achieve between competing purposes and audiences. Lewis’ final speech feels to me like it is speaking for “the young people,” while also being compatible with the ultimate goals of the march organizers. But go too far with compromised rhetoric, and speakers could have ended up playing into the “white moderate” agenda (be patient and wait, perhaps forever) that King would warn about repeatedly in his own writing.

Lewis ends both versions of the speech by insisting that whatever he might be willing to compromise on, it will not be this. In the original draft, he writes, “We will make the action of the past few months look petty. And I say to you, WAKE UP AMERICA!” In the final version, he states, less ominously, but perhaps even more directly, “We must say: ‘Wake up America!  Wake up!’  For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”

There are probably almost unlimited lessons to draw from Lewis’ speech, and from the process by which he and others refined it, but for me the most relevant is this strive for balance. It’s important to listen to all stakeholders. It’s important to build broad coalitions. But it’s also important to state, clearly and directly, the things that must be stated.

And it should also be said that just because many reactionary readers focus on only the “nice” parts of King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”— which likely went through its own difficult series of revisions, and which King apparently deviated from during his actual remarks— doesn’t mean that speech didn’t contain some of the same fire as Lewis’. After all, the entire thesis of King’s speech is that America has continued to betray its supposed ideals— the “promissory note” from the speech’s opening lines— for a hundred years following the Emancipation Proclamation. Standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, King repudiates America for making Lincoln, in a sense, a liar.

And King echoes Lewis’ final words repeatedly, such as when he states, “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” Just as Lewis foreshadows further upheaval and turmoil if America does not act to make African Americans free immediately, King states, “This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”

Later, he states,

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

Lewis’ speech is often contrasted with King’s as if there was no anger or despair in King’s speech, which is often characterized as hopeful. While King injected hopeful rhetoric in several places— perhaps with the goal of maintaining the tenuous allyship of white leaders like Kennedy and O’Doyle— including in the possibly improvised “I have a dream” passage towards the end of the speech— much of his message is about the betrayal of the American Dream, and the unrest that will result from continued betrayal.

As we deal with today’s social justice issues— including the defunding (through voucher schemes and other means) of public schools which today serve majority minority populations, attacks on the rights of transgender and gender nonconforming students, attacks on attempts to make our schools and our texts reflect the diversity of our student bodies and our country— it’s important to listen to what others have to say. At times, it might even be useful to consider where the rhetoric of extremist groups, like Moms for Liberty, is actually coming from. But it’s also important to forcefully, and with aggressive rhetoric when necessary, push back on those who would like to present human writes as political opinions, or diversity as a merely “liberal” preference.

Just as in King’s time, I believe the biggest enemies of progress are often those who present themselves— and often feel themselves to be— reasonable “moderates”. Those who constantly choose caution and a go-along-to-get-along mentality. Of course, many pressured King, Lewis, and others, to be patient, to wait, to choose the path of moderation, and at times they did so. But it’s frightening to think about the progress that might have been lost if they had only chosen moderation, if they had backed down every time they were labeled as radicals— or, significantly for our own “anti-woke” era— as Communists. Many organizations that purport to represent the same interests Lewis and King represented— minorities, workers, the oppressed, the undefended, the disenfranchised— need to reflect long and hard on whether they have sold away too much of that mission for the golden calf of “moderation”.

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