If a picture is worth a thousand words, the lives of the Rev. C.T. Vivian and Congressman John Lewis, were truly priceless.
Pictured thousands of times over—with the young, old, and in between—vibrantly colored photos of both men with the many people to which they generously gave of their treasured time and talents flooded the internet in the wake of their deaths.
Over the course of their lives, and especially during their latter years, they each took the time to take photos with people they knew really well, including those prominent and powerful, as effortlessly as they did with children, rising activists, and random admirers in places like the grocery store—people who they didn’t know at all.
In a world where images matter, the faces of these two now long lionized men must have smiled brightly at thousands of cameras over the course of their lifetimes. Most often, they were outfitted in dark-colored suits and white shirts replete with neckties that became the signature look of the nonviolent protests of the modern Civil Rights Movement.
In addition to their collective cultural value, these images are especially personally-prized for making plain the common touch of both Vivian and Lewis as elders. I, too, was beneficiary of their willingness to pose for now treasured photos. The enduring value of my photos and others like them for so many of my generation is not missed on me.
Added to these many disparate images are photos of Vivian and Lewis as devoted fathers and husbands—Vivian’s wife of 58 years, Octavia Geans Vivian died in 2011 while Lewis’s wife Lillian Miles Lewis predeceased him in 2013 after 45 years of marriage.
Together, these portraits of Vivian and Lewis, many of them taken in the city of Atlanta where they lived and loved for the vast majority of their lives, endure as evidence of each man’s lifelong commitment to fidelity, public service, and social justice.
They are powerful—there is no debating that.
But it is the power of the preceding generation’s photos, the ones which feature the places and people as well as the problem (of American apartheid) that made Vivian and Lewis—as well as their Nashville Movement comrades, the Rev. James Lawson and the Rev. Bernard LaFayette Jr., Diane Nash, and the late James Bevel—national heroes and international icons of nonviolence, that truly packs a punch.
Vivian and Lewis’s shared philosophical commitments to nonviolence and then-radical belief in its transforming resolve to dismantle state-sanctioned segregation, united them in friendship while they were students at Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), and emerging activists in the city’s civil rights movement during the late 1950s and 1960s.
In the midst of police batons, fire hoses, and attack dogs, Vivan, who was already married with children, and Lewis, who was little more than a child himself, put their bodies and literal lives on the line for black souls.
As nonviolent protesters of systemic racism and white supremacy, they were labeled enemies of the state; danger and death were as constant companions to them as was steely determination and enduring hope.
Don’t let the condolences of enemies of Black equality, Black joy, and of Black life fool you: efforts to topple white supremacy were not then, are not now, and will never be interpreted as “good trouble.”
Over a half-century since Vivian and Lewis sat-in, freedom-rode and took a knee against systemic racism, a new generation of black activists are fighting against the very same evils—as well as so many more.
Let that sink in.
In a world where black lives have yet to matter in all of the ways in which white lives do, Black Lives Matter activists, are fighting for all Black lives, the gay, the straight, the queer, the college-educated, and the criminal too. We all matter.
Vivian and Lewis shared this belief. So expansive was their love for blackness and for black people, that they grew as our needs did.
Whether in quiet whispers in private sidebar conversations with younger people, or in loud booms from public lecterns, the gentle reflectiveness of these men despite the ugliness they endured, remained.
How it did, I still don’t know.
All I know is that the proud, sullen faces of a young Vivian and Lewis should always stare back at us in those booking photos from long ago as the most powerful photos of them ever taken.
Despite a mountain of white supremacy that cast a shadow over their youthful faces, Cordy Tindell Vivian and John Robert Lewis shared a determination that lasted their entire lives. In no way did the bad trouble they suffered for our cause blot out the seemingly endless hope in their hearts.
