John Lewis, Julian Bond, and the 1986 Congressional Election

John Lewis 1940-2020 from The Guardian

John Lewis served over 30 years in the US House of Representatives representing the Georgia 5^th district. His history as a civil rights leader and victim of a brutal beating while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge during a march for voting rights propelled Lewis to a status as an icon. His long service in the House, stand for issues of justice & racial reconciliation, and his willingness to befriend those on the opposite side of the aisle brought him the reputation as the conscience of Congress.

                Less known was the campaign which won Lewis his long-held seat in Congress which provided Lewis a national platform and transformed him into figure beloved by Americans of every ethnicity and political persuasion. Lewis ran for the 5th District seat in 1977 after Andrew Young resigned to serve as President Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations but Lewis lost his first bid for Congress after losing the vote to Wyche Fowler. After a brief service in the Carter administration, Lewis served six years as an Atlanta city councilor until Fowler resigned his House seat to run and eventually narrowly win the election to the US Senate. The campaign for the open 5^th District seat brought Lewis into conflict with another figure who also deserved the label as an icon of the civil rights movement, Julian Bond, and a campaign long remembered as a no holds barred political fight.

Julian Bond & John Lewis from Society of US Intellectual History

            John Lewis and Julian Bond both emerged into leadership during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and were both co-founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). But while men shared leadership and friendship during significant elements of civil rights, their backgrounds and experiences contrasted completely different backgrounds of being black during Jim Crow segregation. Julian Bond was the son of historian and university president Horace Mann Bond and Julian Bond enjoyed a childhood surrounded by academics and exposure to intellectuals in what many would describe as a life of privilege.  Bond describes his life,

My father got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He taught at a succession of black colleges. He was president of Fort Valley State College, president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, dean of education at Atlanta University. [At Lincoln University,] we had this great big old white house like a Southern plantation house. In our home were all the great figures of the day. I have a picture of me sitting on Paul Robeson’s knee while Robeson sings to me. I have a picture of Albert Einstein. It was just an incredible life for a kid. . . . I never really knew what a segregated school was until high school. At George School [a Quaker institution in Pennsylvania], I started dating this white girl from Virginia. . . . We’d go into Philadelphia on Saturdays or Sundays, then get back to school around 6 or 7 in the evening. Then one afternoon, the dean of men called me into his office. . . . He looked like a tennis player or a country club golf pro who had just begun to age. He told me, in a very calm and polite voice, that he’d appreciate it if I didn’t wear my school jacket on those trips to Philadelphia. It was just as though he had slapped me across the face. All of a sudden, you realize all the talk there’s been, all the whispering. . . . And also that you’re a Negro. That moment was the first time I realize realized it—that distance. . . . I simply couldn’t speak anything to him. I just stood up and walked out of his office.[1]

Bond remained at the center of civil rights deciding to remain in Atlanta and served over twenty years in the Georgia General Assembly and became a founder with Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. After the election to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 Bond and seven other black representatives faced opposition when white members of the Georgia House refused to allow them to take their place in the House because of their opposition to the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court forced the Georgia Assembly to seat Bond declaring that the House denied him freedom of speech.[2] In 1968, he received a nomination for vice-president of the United States at the Democratic National Convention in spite of at the age of 28 not meeting the age requirement. Over time Bond grew adept at legislating eventually becoming the chair of the Fulton County delegation and sponsored bills assisting poor Georgians in obtaining home loans. Eventually, his years of effort helped to create the Fifth District as the first majority-black congressional district in Georgia, ironically the office he lost to Lewis. The handsome and urbane Bond represented the future of black leadership and in 1977 when he hosted SaturdayNight Live, Bond presented an image of cool to the nation. Nationwide appearances and speaking tours hinted at a bright future for Bond as some even predicted that Bond would even reach the Georgia governor’s office.[3]

Julian Bond & MLK from The New York Times

            John Lewis as the third child of ten children of a sharecropping family was in many ways the opposite of Julian Bond. Lewis experienced not only grinding poverty but the worst of Jim Crow segregation as a native of Troy, Alabama. By the age of four, Lewis picked cotton and peanuts just a few miles from the boyhood home of George Wallace. Discrimination and injustice distressed Lewis,

            My father couldn’t afford a newspaper subscription. I’d walk half a mile to get my grandfather’s paper after he got done reading it. I kept up with what was going on, reading that paper and listening to that radio. . . . We ordered everything from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. We called it ‘the Wish Book.’ . . . I was bused 18 miles to the Pike County Training School. Black schools were ‘training schools’; whites went to high schools. We had old broken-down buses, ragged books, a rundown building. White students had new buses, nice painted buildings with the grounds kept up. . . . In Troy, they had a soda fountain where you could get Coca-Cola. We called it a combination. A black person could not take a seat. We had to stand at the end of the counter. ‘May I have a combination?’ You put your money down and went outside to the street corner to drink it. . . . As a young child I saw a difference. I resented it. Even the country road where I grew up—because black people owned the land, the road was left unpaved for many, many years. When it rained, the bus got stuck in the mud. That was life in Alabama.[4]

Inspired by the Montgomery bus boycott, Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations while a student at Fisk University and later became one of the original Freedom Riders. Lewis served as the leader of SNCC in 1963 and adhered strongly to a philosophy of nonviolence and reconciliation during a tumultuous of confronting the worst evils of racism. Lewis emerged as one of the important leaders and speakers during the March on Washington. On March 7, 1965, Lewis endured a beating during the march from Selma to Montgomery which fractured his skull and left scars he carried the rest of life.

John Lewis during his time on the Atlanta City Council from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

            Despite an old friendship rooted in the civil rights movement, Bond and Lewis faced an intense and bitter Democratic primary campaign when both entered the race to replace Wyche Fowler as the representative for the Georgia Fifth district. Because the 5^th district was overwhelmingly Democratic, a win in the primary was equivalent to victory. Bond was the favorite of the black establishment of Atlanta and received the important endorsement of Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young who also formerly served as the representative of the 5^th District. At the time Bond was the greater celebrity and hosted fundraisers featuring Washington mayor Marion Barry and jazz great Miles Davis. Bond felt entitled to the seat, “I’d created the seat, drawn the lines myself, I’d made it possible for a black person to be elected. I wanted badly to be there. I could see myself there. It seemed natural to me, the next step.[5]”  

State Senator Julian Bond shakes hands with his opponent City councilman John Lewis at a rally in 1986

Drug use became a focus of the campaign when rumors spread that Bond engaged in drug use. Lewis pounced on the issue and challenged Bond to take a drug test while Bond accused Lewis of “McCarthyism and demagoguery.”[6] During a debate, Lewis proclaimed that he passed his urinalysis test and came out clean but Bond refused to take the test because it “trivializes the issue.[7]” In black churches, the question arose on whether Bond was a man of faith as his intellectual personality appeared off-putting to many. But it was the white population whose mistrust of Bond became decisive in the election. Many of Atlanta’s white liberal establishment mistrusted Bond and wondered out loud if he would represent them in Washington. Although Bond was favored, the election remained tight and Lewis defeated Bond in an upset. From the New York Times,

With all 241 precincts reporting in the unofficial count tonight, Mr. Lewis had 34,548 votes, 52 percent of the total, to 32,170 votes for Mr. Bond. In a race that badly strained relations in Atlanta's black community, Mr. Lewis's margin of victory appeared to come from his strong lead in white precincts on the city's north side, the last to be tabulated tonight. Mr. Lewis, endorsed by the Atlanta newspapers and a favorite of the white liberal establishment and neighborhood organizations, swept the white vote in the first primary, and Mr. Bond captured the black vote. But in a district whose electorate is 58 percent black, that division was almost enough to give Mr. Bond a majority. He got 47 percent to Mr. Lewis's 35.[8]

Defeat devastated Bond and claimed whites cost him the victory he believed he deserved.  The bitter campaign destroyed the friendship between Lewis and Bond who wouldn’t speak to each other until 1989. Bond’s marriage dissolved into bitter acrimony as his wife Alice publicly accused Bond of drug use although she later recanted he accusations. After a divorce Bond left Atlanta and relocated to Washington. He taught at American University and the University of Virginia. In 1998, Bond assumed the chairmanship of the NAACP after a scandal rocked the organization. But many still felt that Bond never reached his full potential and that he never really recovered from the defeat in 1986.

Lewis went on to a storied Congressional career and came to be regarded as an American saint due to his sacrifice at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and his role as the conscience of Congress. But in spite of his present revered status, Lewis was still a politician and his 1986 campaign demonstrated a willingness to engage in the tough and dirty mud of a tough political campaign. His readiness to build bridges in the 1986 campaign anticipated a congressional career that crossed the political divide and work with Republicans even to build friendships with those he disagreed. His touching tribute to Georgia Republican Senator Johnny Isakson upon his retirement was just one testimony of the bonds developed by Lewis. But Lewis also showed a willingness to lead protest when he felt the call and participated in efforts to remind Congress and Americans of the unfished work of civil rights. His doggedness led to the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Lewis served long enough to see BarackObama elected as the nation’s first black president and in 2011 Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Upon his death, Lewis became the first black man to have his body lie in state in the Capitol rotunda. And in spite of his many honors and accomplishments, one must wonder the question of What If? If Bond triumphed in the congressional election of 1986 might Bond have risen to become the conscience of Congress and achieve the promise so many predicted in his youth.

Memorial for John Lewis in the Rotunda

                                    

Sources

Alzuphar, Adolf. "Julian Bond Vs. John Lewis: An Unforgettable Fight For Atlanta’s Fifth Congressional District." Blavitv:News. Last modified July 3, 2017. https://blavity.com/julian-bond-vs-john-lewis-an-unforgettable-fight-for-atlantas-fifth-congressional-district?category1=black-history&subCat=community-submitted&category2=community-submitted.

Clendinen, Dudley. "EX-COLLEAGUE UPSETS JULIAN BOND IN ATLANTA CONGRESSIONAL RUNOFF." New York Times. Last modified September 3, 1986. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/03/us/ex-colleague-upsets-julian-bond-in-atlanta-congressional-runoff.html.

Coppola, Vincent. "The Parable of Julian Bond & John Lewis." Atlanta Magazine. Last modified March 1, 1990. https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/the-parable-of-julian-bond-john-lewis/.

Eversley, Melanie. "Voices: Bond's quiet dignity commanded respect." USA Today. Last modified August 16, 2015. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/16/voices-julian-bond/31819723/.

Hallerman, Tamar. "John Lewis 1940-2020." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Last modified July 2020. https://www.ajc.com/john-lewis-obituary/#chapter-1.

           

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[1] Vincent Coppola, “The Parable of Julian Bond & John Lewis”, Atlanta Magazine,  March 1, 1990, https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/the-parable-of-julian-bond-john-lewis/

[2] Roy Reed,” Julian Bond, Charismatic Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 75,” The New York Times, Aug 16, 2015

[3] Copplola, March 1, 1990.

[4] Coppola, March 1, 1990.

[5] Coppola

[6] Dudley Clendinen, “ Ex-Colleague Upsets Julian Bond in Atlanta Congressional Runoff”, New York Times, Sep 3, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/03/us/ex-colleague-upsets-julian-bond-in-atlanta-congressional-runoff.html

[7] Clendinen

[8] Clendinen

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth by Kevin M. Levin

Gunhawks comic: from Wikipedia

During my childhood and early teen years I was an avid comic book reader. One particular fascinating comic book was a Marvel Western series called Gunhawks. The main character in the comic was a black gunslinger named Reno Jones along with his childhood friend Kid Cassidy. Reno is a freed slave who lived a happy life on the plantation with a kindly master where he and Cassidy grew up as friends. But the Union Army attacked his home and the girl he loved. Rachel Brown became a captive of the Yankees and in response Reno joined the Confederate army. At the end of the war, Reno and Kid Cassidy roamed the west on a quest to find Reno’s lover Rachel. The publication of the Gunhawks comic was in the early Seventies but the Gunhawks was an example of a series of stories that began after the success of the Civil Rights Movement which claimed that the Confederate army had thousands of free blacks and slaves that fought alongside white Rebel soldiers.

Today the proposition that the Confederate army included thousands of black rebels soldiers remains a belief found in websites, Facebook groups, and even museum exhibits. The increasing reach of the internet, amateur historical research, and the desire to validate history for political and cultural purposes has only led to the spread of claims that blacks participated in large numbers in the Confederate forces. Heritage groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans use the narrative of black Confederates as a vindication of their ancestors as well as a tool to set them apart from white extremist groups. Kevin Levin in his book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth draws on primary source documentation to annihilate the legend of black Confederates although he still maintains that the labor of slaves became an essential element of the Confederate ear effort. As soldiers marched to war, many brought body servants and other slaves who served the army in a wide range of roles including cooking, foraging, cleaning, and manual labor indispensable for a functioning army.

Actual Confederates would consider the identification of camp slaves with Confederate soldiers puzzling. In fact the idea put forth by many present Neo-Confederate that the Confederate Army consisted of entire regiments of black soldiers is contradicted by the fact that the Confederacy forbid the participation of black soldiers in the army. Some point to the existence of the black Louisiana Native Guard as an example of a Confederate regiment within the Confederacy but their usefulness to the defense of New Orleans proved limited as the state militia limited membership to “free white males capable of bearing arms,” and many of the Native Guard became members of General Butler’s U.S. Corps d’ Afrique.(45)  In spite of the fact that free blacks volunteered service the response of the southern Government was a denial of any role in combat for all blacks.  In response to reports in Northern newspapers that the Confederacy recruited blacks to serve, John B. Jones of the Confederate War Department responded in his diary saying, “This is utterly untrue. We have no armed slaves to fight for us, nor do we fear a servile insurrection.” Much of Jones’ insistence was a response to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union policy of arming blacks, which he viewed as an attempt to instigate a slave rebellion. (46) Viewing slavery and white supremacy as a bedrock principle of Southern society and culture the very idea of arming blacks undercut the reason for an independent South.

One of the few lone voices calling for arming slaves was the Irish Confederate general, Patrick Cleburne. By 1864, Cleburne believed that the reserves of available white soldiers was exhausted and promoted the idea of offering freedom to slaves who fought with the South. He also believed that the participation of black soldiers in the army would, “strip the enemy of foreign sympathy and assistance.” (58)  But Cleburne’s suggestion faced instant rejection as Joseph E. Johnson refused to forward Cleburne’s proposal. It was not until January 1865 that faced with defeat would Southern politicians consider the idea of a regiment of blacks. But this plan of desperation was too little and too late as the Confederate government fled Richmond.

General Patrick Cleburne from National Park Service

By the end of the 19^th century, southerners looked for ways to understand and explain their defeat which led to the myth of the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause viewed the War as not about slavery, but as a struggle for state’s rights and a fight to protect the southern way of life. Central to the myth was the benevolence of slavery and the loyalty of slaves. The participation of the camp slaves became evidence of the loyalty and fealty of slaves to their masters. During reunions of Confederate veterans, many former camp slaves participated and became symbols of the loyal slave. As the civil rights movement began to impact the South in the sixties and seventies, many groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Daughters of the Confederacy pointed to the camp slaves as evidence that the War was not caused by slavery and that the Confederate cause had a just foundation. Kevin Levin provides an excellent resource in refuting the myth of the black Confederate and another essential reading in the role of African Americans in the American Civil War.

see:

Levin, Kevin M. Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Smithsonian Magazine, The Diaries Left Behind by Confederate Soldiers Reveal the True Role of Enslaved Labor at Gettysburg

 

Photo of Sergeant Andrew M Chandler of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment with his family slave Silas. This photo is often seen as evidence regarding the existence of black Confederates. But Silas served only as a camp slave and the weapons were most likely props. (see Levin, p. 13)