The Iveagh House Commemorative Lecture Series
Introductory remarks by Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade,
Mr. Eamon Gilmore T.D.
On the occasion of an
Address by Congressman John Lewis on
the US civil rights movement and its global legacy
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I wish to warmly welcome everyone to Iveagh House this evening. We are honoured to have with us Congressman John Lewis of Georgia as our Speaker in the Iveagh House Commemorative lecture series.
Congressman Lewis is an iconic figure who belongs in the Pantheon of great leaders in the American Civil Rights Movement. He has fought the scars and stains of racism all his life. He holds an honoured place in the great progressive tradition in American history. A tradition that, in good days and bad, has stood for the rights of working class men and women, for poor and oppressed people, for people without a voice who have been pushed to the edges and margins of society by racial hatred, by bigotry and by grinding poverty. John Lewis has stood for justice.
Edmund Burke, the great Irish Parliamentarian and writer, said that “whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is ... safe”. Martin Luther King believed this. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist leader, believed it and struggled all his life to build a bridge between freedom and justice for African Americans.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s should not be seen through any romantic or soft lens. The century since Emancipation and the ending of the Civil War had brought a measure of freedom but not true freedom to African Americans. Instead, Jim Crow laws and brutal segregation and discrimination; pervasive and deep discrimination in employment and in day to day life; voting disqualification and rigged elections through Kafka-esque laws and absurd “technical” requirements such as the so called literacy test or counting jelly beans in a jar: this was the lot of African Americans, especially in the deep South, as the Second World War ended.
There is a scene at the beginning of Stephen Spielberg’s film “Lincoln” where two African American soldiers approach Mr Lincoln on the issue of unequal pay and promotions compared to white army soldiers. Lincoln, more than most, understood the injustice that African Americans would continue to face after Emancipation. He understood the “original sin” of American slavery. His second Inaugural address, only a few weeks before his assassination, assessed this with unflinching moral clarity in what Frederick Douglass told him, on the night of the Inauguration, was a “sacred effort”.
Humiliation and degradation was the daily lot of African Americans when Martin Luther King, John Lewis and other Civil Rights leaders in the early 1960s said this was a moral stain on America and had to change. They set out to challenge the conscience of America.
The “Freedom Riders” by their courage highlighted the evil of segregation in public transport and captured the imagination of the world. Many hundreds, including John Lewis, were arrested and jailed in Mississippi during the Freedom Rides. But they helped bring an end to segregation in public transportation.
Across the South, courageous men and women demanded their rights.
The Civil Rights movement in the United States did not have easy victories. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, and Dr King’s “I have a dream” speech, both prayer and plea to America, are now part of the story of America. But the struggle was harsh and difficult.
In March 1965, John Lewis, with Hosea Williams, led six hundred peaceful protestors across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in what was intended to be a march from Selma to Montgomery. The scenes of violence and brutality against the marchers by Alabama State Troopers shocked America and the world and helped hasten passage of the Voting Right Act of 1965.
This year we mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. In so doing, America honours the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement for their courage and commitment even if, as Congressman Lewis has often reminded us, the journey remains far from finished.
A few weeks ago, President Obama launched “My Brother’s Keeper Initiative” in support of boys and young men of colour. . Congressman Lewis has noted realities that should give us pause: young African American men and boys, for example, are six times more likely to be victims of gun violence than white boys. In the State of Georgia, only 49 per cent of African boys graduated from high school, compared to 65 per cent of white boys. Too many African American young men waste their best years in prison.
The work of building justice goes on.
John Lewis has lived a long journey from Parchman Penitentiary to “Bloody Sunday” in Selma to become a Congressional and political leader of great authority and moral weight. As the Prophet Isaiah urged, he has looked to the rock from which he was hewn and remained faithful to the cause.
The Civil Rights Movement in America had worldwide resonance, not least in Northern Ireland. It inspired young activists in the North to peacefully demand justice and change. It highlighted that injustice against entire Communities cannot be allowed to fester without endangering the entire fabric of society.
Civil Rights protestors in the late 1960s in Northern Ireland were inspired by, and identified themselves with, the US Civil Rights Movement and the struggle of African Americans: they sang “we shall overcome” and looked to model protest marches on the Selma-Montgomery march and American Civil Rights Movement strategy.
Many of the issues were the same: employment discrimination; housing; the grievance of being second class citizens that had built up over many years.
Above all, the Civil Rights leaders, our Noble Peace Laureate John Hume chief amongst them, in the North modelled themselves on the same fundamental principle of non-violence that was the hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement in America.
Overcoming bitterness and division requires more than placing laws on the Statute book. It means tackling, with imagination and determination, what Alan Patton wrote of apartheid South Africa in “Cry the Beloved Country”: overcoming in hearts “the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear”.
We in Ireland are now embarked on that journey. In the Good Friday Agreement, the signatory parties committed themselves to the “achievement of reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust and to the protection and vindication of the Human Rights of all”.
Where fear and suspicious become embedded in the very fabric of society, healing can involve hard work and the easing of wounds that only time brings. . We know this from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. And we know it from our experience in Ireland. But there is no alternative to keeping faith with the journey. Dr King gave his life for that faith and for the cause of peaceful change through non violence.
In 1876, Frederick Douglass, once a fugitive slave himself, spoke at the opening of the Freemen’s Monument to Abraham Lincoln in Washington. In a measured and deeply honest appraisal of the war years, he said of Abraham Lincoln: he did not hesitate, he did not doubt, he did not falter.
That was the same creed that inspired Martin Luther King, John Lewis and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. It must also be the creed of all political leaders in Ireland as we work towards healing fears and divisions on our own island, helping to heal them in hearts, not only addressing them in law and statute.
Protecting the autonomy and rights of the individual; safeguarding the private space of each person, working to safeguard the self identity and rights of each individual – as individuals and members of groups – remains the only road we have in healing divisions. And I remain convinced that civil society is a vital buffer zone to shape the work of the state in any democracy but also to strengthen the private realm where the work of building and healing takes place.
Three years ago, popular demonstrations across the Arab world gave the world a moment of hope. President Obama summed up this hope by saying it was a “historic opportunity... to pursue the world as it should be”.
The hopes inspired by the Arab spring have dimmed but, if there is one lesson from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, it is that the hurdles to democracy and justice may be strong but they will, however long it takes, give way, despite many painful twists and turns on the road.
In perhaps his greatest speech, Robert F. Kennedy addressed students in Cape Town, South Africa in June 1966 and spoke of his belief that “ripples of hope” spread each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice. Together, Senator Kennedy said, these individual ripples of hope can help build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Martin Luther King also believed this. His dream, as Congressman Lewis said last year on the anniversary of the March on Washington,
was “a nation and a world at peace with itself”. Dr King opposed the Vietnam War although some in the Civil Rights Movement at the time urged caution and compromise. But Dr King did not believe the cause of justice could be separated neatly into different moral compartments. He had a deep awareness that, as Kant put it, out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing is ever made. And he believed that societies can only overcome difficulties and problems if they tackle them squarely and with honesty.
Douglass, Lincoln, King, Kennedy and Hume were all torch bears for the cause of liberty and justice for all, irrespective of rank, race or creed. John Lewis is of this pantheon, a man who since the 1960s has ceaselessly fought for his ideals.
John Lewis has devoted his life to extending the meaning and practice of freedom. From his work as Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the halls of Congress, he has kept an unwavering eye on the prize.
And, this evening, I want to thank Congressman Lewis for the support given by the United States Congress to the work of reconciliation in Ireland, including by the International Fund for Ireland. We in Ireland owe a great deal to the strong support of the United States, under successive Presidents, to the work of healing divisions on our own Island.
I am honoured to introduce Congressman John Lewis this evening and to salute him as someone who has lived in his own life the words of the Irish poet Louis MacNeice:
“By a high star, our course is set.
Our end is life. Put out to sea”.
In the prologue to his wonderful biography, “Walking with the Wind: a Memoir of the Movement”, Congressman Lewis recounts a story from his childhood when his family and friends were forced to take shelter from a storm, whose ferocity was such that it threatened to lift the woodframe house they were in from the ground. Together they held hands and, moving from one part of the house to the other, succeeded in maintaining the trembling house from lifting.
It is a story which has echoed throughout his life; in his own words, “Children holding hands. Walking with the wind. That is America to me – not just the movement for civil rights, but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us a nation, as a whole”.
Ladies and Gentleman, I present to you Congressman John Lewis
Thank you