How ML King Got 'Woke': Emmett Till, John Lewis, and the '63 March on Washington

Throughout his life the preacher Revd Martin Luther King used Biblical reference (Old as well as New) to urge his listeners forward to commitment and action, in church and community. King's Biblicism was a natural extension of his Black christian millennial Protestant thinking, the social gospel and the social covenant saturated with the urgency of the prophet Isaiah. "Woke" begins in this Jewish Bible metaphor.

This webinar explores some of the narratives often hidden in the shadow of Dr. King, and yet central to his memory. John Lewis remains the most significant figure in American civil rights. Born to share-cropper parents, in Troy, Alabama, Lewis began his activism as a student at Fisk University, leading the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, protesting segregation at lunch counters.
In 1955 the vicious racial murder of a boy his own age profoundly affected Lewis, as Till's scandalous death affected King. The killing -- and the congratulatory response of the white citizenry in Sumner, Mississippi -- was for Lewis, as for King, unimaginable and unforgettable: in his memoirs Lewis writes, "I was shaken to the core by the killing of Emmett Till. I was fifteen, Black, at the edge of my own manhood just like him. He could have been me."

The trauma of young Till places Lewis and King at the beginning of the civil movement for justice. We celebrate a federal holiday for Dr Martin Luther King; the holiday is often an uneasy gesture, deflecting this culture's inability to hear King's final militancy. Martin King was arrested 30 times. John Lewis was arrested 40 times, the last few times, recently, as an active Congressman representing Georgia.

For 55 years after King’s death "the boy from Troy" took King's legacy to places King could not have imagined. If there is a politic to this presentation, it is this: Remember John Lewis, and let the good trouble begun by Harriet Tubman, Lewis, and others continue with us. Lewis doesn’t need a holiday, or streets named after him. He needs to be remembered. We need to listen, and hear still that call for a just society.

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